


It's all remain in family

by PerezdeMiranda



Series: Enusor of Kóverax [3]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Abusive Parents, Androids, BDSM, Canon LGBTQ Character, Child Death, Childhood, Childhood Memories, Cyberpunk, Dark Fantasy, Dysfunctional Family, Dystopia, Elementary School, Elf Culture & Customs, Elf/Human Relationship(s), Family Drama, Fantastic Racism, Fantasy, Gangsters, Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Suicide, LGBTQ Character, LGBTQ Themes, M/M, Magic, Online Dating, Original Character Death(s), Original Character(s), Parent-Child Relationship, Robot/Human Relationships, Robots, School, Science Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Suicide, Swords & Sorcery, Wizards, mafia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-07
Updated: 2021-03-05
Packaged: 2021-03-12 23:35:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 9
Words: 23,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29268825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PerezdeMiranda/pseuds/PerezdeMiranda
Series: Enusor of Kóverax [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2093667





	1. Enusor of Kóverax: Zombis (Part 1)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Todo queda en familia](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29268240) by [PerezdeMiranda](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PerezdeMiranda/pseuds/PerezdeMiranda). 



So many assumptions have been made about the education I received or did not receive at Kóverax Castle…! So many, and so little original! Each new rumor was a photocopy of a previous one. All were based, sadly, on the same: in the inquisitorial entourage, I have taught myself to hate heretics using dichotomies of the style "we-them", "good-bad", and so on. Or, if not, they limited themselves to affirming that I trained based on fear, with overprotection or techniques like that.  
It is so common for Heretics to project their vices onto others!  
Whenever an attempt has been made to support any of these rumors, theories, hypotheses, or whatever, the same argument was used, the same hypothetically empirical proof: "Enusor of Kóverax tried to commit suicide while he was just a child." Heretics assumed that a suicide attempt at such a young age was only explained by having received an abominable and dysfunctional upbringing.  
I will not defend my education; it was, indeed, abominable and dysfunctional, though no more abominable or more dysfunctional than what he had received in any heretical setting. But it didn't really have to do with my suicide attempt. The reasons for my suicide attempt, in fact, have a much more childish motivation, the result of the typical habit that every self-respecting child has of wanting to be the center of attention whatever it is and to be right in everything.  
It's really not appropriate to call it a "suicide attempt." I don't think I would have been able to blow my brains out, surely. I will never know; I didn't have time to pull the trigger. I just wanted to play suicide to scare the Heretics.  
In fact, that was one of the few clues I was given at Kóverax about people from the outside world. Which are all easily creepy.  
And in that, we differ a little. Hence the change in perspective and his inability to understand my way of seeing the world. Regardless of whether or not I wanted to commit suicide, Baeralas and company did want to end my life before resigning themselves to being hunted by the Heretics, and I was aware of this. Knowing this will lead many to believe that the Kóverax bandits were so highly depraved that they manipulated me to undervalue my life to the point of being able to sacrifice it.  
It's not like that. In fact, I would dare to say the opposite. In the inquisitorial entourage, they did not manipulate me. They weren't paying enough attention to manipulate me. They didn't manipulate me! And precisely because they didn't manipulate me, I thought that way. Whoever thinks otherwise is due to a damn heretical manipulation!  
Heretics are manipulated. They manipulate them for many things, but this one is pretty obvious. Now it's time to say that "heretics are manipulated to value life," I suppose. Not exactly like that, although many times I say short stories to scandalize everyone around me.  
In reality, they are not manipulated to value life. And if they did it wouldn't be bad. Valuing life, as such, is not bad. The problem comes from before. It comes from long before. It comes from the concept of "life". The concept of "life" is an heretical abomination used to manipulate the masses. The same happens with the concept of "death".  
I like philosophy and abstract thinking, but I don't want to be misunderstood. I have always been a person of science, of empirical science. Any scientist who hears me can intervene, with good reason, telling me about the biological evidence for the existence of "life". An organism that fulfills I do not know how many functions is alive; science says so, and I totally agree. It seems good to me that “the living” is differentiated from “the dead” and from “the inert”; to oppose it would be fanaticism.  
What I am not so comfortable with is the opposition of the concept of "life" to the concept of "death". Not only am I not comfortable, but it strikes me as a heretical abomination. A heretical abomination that should be eradicated. And I emphasize the "should". It will not be eradicated either by my hand or by anyone. Humanity would have to start from scratch if we wanted a pure Cromlyrite society. It is too late for any noticeable changes.  
Heretics start from a purely biological and empirical concept - "the living" - and transform it into something purely metaphysical and absurd - "life" -. At birth, organisms begin a process that does not end until the day of their "death". A being that is not born cannot die. "Death" is not really a decisive event: it is a process. We begin to die the moment we are born, and what people understand by "death" implies "finishing dying." Therefore, “life” would be “dying”. These concepts, initially, should not be bad per se; however, what is the point of posing them as opposites?  
In that stupid opposition, the Heresy begins.  
Let's take an example. Let's say you have a neighbor who likes to read. Let's say you find it reading and someone asked you "hey, what's the opposite of this?" What is the opposite of a person reading? What image would be the opposite of your neighbor reading? I don't know, I can think of many. Your neighbor watching TV, your neighbor playing video games… Your neighbor watching gossip on the Internet, your neighbor taking drugs… You can think of many things; all of them can be summarized as "your neighbor doing something other than reading."  
However, would you think of your neighbor reading the last word of the book? No, right? Reading the last word would be "the end of the reading process", not "the opposite of the reading process." The end of something cannot be its opposite. There is nothing eternal; if something exists, it must have an end. With life, the same thing happens.  
"Death" is not "the opposite of life." The opposite of "life" is, in my opinion, non-existence, but not "death." It is true that when someone dies, he passes into non-existence. But that same person was already in non-existence before being born, and, as far as I know, in no type of culture is their anguish at the fact of not having existed before being born.  
What difference is there to not existing after ceasing to live? Are there really relevant differences?  
There are not. Heretics do not give importance to the fact of not existing after death. They attach importance to death itself. At the moment of death, at the end of life. A fucking millisecond? I don't know. I do not get it.  
There is a lot of talk about "quick deaths" and "slow deaths", but what criteria are followed? Let's think of a death row inmate. At what point is it considered to have stopped living and is beginning to die? Maybe when the executioner turns on the electric chair? Or when they put a damp cloth on his forehead? Or maybe when they drag him into the room? Or, better yet, maybe when he commits the crime that will sentence him to the scaffold?  
It's all too ambiguous, right?  
And why not talk about the moment I was born? Had I not been born, I could never have begun to die. To be born is to expose oneself to die. To be born is, rather, to begin to die. Therefore, are there relevant differences between "living" and "dying"? It is exactly the same! "Death" is the final millisecond of the "live-die" process and "life" is the grouping of the remaining milliseconds. It makes no sense to separate a millisecond from the rest and name it.  
Therefore, the concepts "life-death" and the concepts "live-die" have no meaning. The rejection of all concepts is the basis of the cromlyrite cult. Heretics, wrongly, tend to think that Cromlyr is the personification of death. It's not like that. "Cromlyr" is the sum of the millisecond called "death" with the milliseconds called "life".  
Cromlyrites do not "worship death." We simply assume it to the point of subtracting all relevance from it. "Death" is within something greater, Cromlyr, and Cromlyr is the only thing that deserves our attention. Not "death" or "life."  
Rejecting the concepts "life" and "death" in favor of the concept "Cromlyr" is essential to understand why I, being just a child, tried to commit suicide.  
The moment a Heretic separates "life" from "death", he assimilates that "death" is an uncomfortable truth and feels pain, fear, and confusion at the existence of the last millisecond of Cromlyr.  
It is logical. Before they used to appease that fear with faith; they believed in resurrection, or paradise, or bullshit like that. The millisecond "death" was no longer scary because it was not a "closing" millisecond, but a "transition" one.  
Not a bad fix. It's heretical, but not bad at all. The problem came with the arrival of the zaibatsus. The Heretics fought each other, and the greatest heresy of all prevailed upon the others. The zaibatsus triumphed and subdued the world, instilling its terrible scale of values.  
We are entering a new era, a new way of conceiving reality. It was important to earn money at all costs. And the cromlyrite mentality was not profitable.  
A person can only generate wealth while Cromlyr is, while he is "living-dying." There are few exceptions; some famous artists can generate wealth despite having ceased to exist, but little else. I don't know of anyone who could produce money before existing; at least I don't fall right now. The longer a person's Cromlyr process - the "live-die" process - the more wealth that person can generate. It is profitable for zaibatsus, therefore, for people to extend this process as long as possible.  
If a Heretic is ascribed to a religion that assures him life beyond the millisecond "death", that Heretic does not have to be afraid of that millisecond. But if religion disappears, everything changes. The Heretic still considers the "life-death" distinction relevant, but death terrifies him, it is real and it is a definite end. His Heretic status prevents him from considering "death" as an irrelevant millisecond. On the contrary: it is a very relevant millisecond, a true so uncomfortable that it cannot be faced.  
And what to do if you can't afford it? Easy: avoid thinking about it. Look away. And that's where the zaibatsus start to fill their pockets.  
The proposed solution is the following: try to alleviate the suffering that the existence of a millisecond-death entails by increasing the millisecond-life of a person's Cromlyr process as much as possible, in order to feel the millisecond-death as far as possible. The feeling of remoteness with respect to the millisecond-death is such that fear and anguish relax slightly, but that relaxation is enough for the Heretics to have the goal of obtaining the greatest number of "milliseconds-life" possible in a vain effort. to forget the existence of the "millisecond-death". And the more "milliseconds-life" obtained by individuals, the more money such individuals can generate.  
That way the zaibatsus win. And the zaibatsus have been winning for too long. This is why it is so difficult to understand an alternative way of thinking.  
That is why it is so difficult to understand that, as a child, I would want to commit suicide.  
The desire to accumulate "milliseconds-life" to ward off the "millisecond-death" is a purely cultural trait, established in only some societies. Society teaches you to distinguish "death" from "life." It cannot be said that the inquisitorial entourage taught me to be a cromlyrite. It is not taught to be cromlyrite; sentient beings are born, by default, being cromlyrites; in any case, it is taught to stop being it.  
I can understand and admire all those people who, passionate about books, decide to accumulate as many milliseconds-lives as possible in order to read all possible books. On that occasion, the ultimate goal is not the milliseconds-life as such, but the books. It is the same with people who accumulate all possible milliseconds-life in order to spend more time with their loved ones, whom they love to the point of giving everything for them. Completely admirable and understandable. It is also completely admirable and understandable that someone wants to accumulate milliseconds-life because living-dying is pleasant in itself, just by being able to breathe and hear the birds sing.  
There are many, many good reasons to die-live as long as possible, but feeling the millisecond-death distant is not even a reason. This was not taught to me in the entourage. In the entourage, rather, no one taught me to give importance to the millisecond-death. I did not learn that heretical behavior.  
A live-die process based solely on feeling the millisecond-death distance has two fundamental objectives: to produce and consume. Consume to produce and produce to consume. It is in the zaibatsus' best interest to do so. The moment you produce, the zaibatsus make money. The moment you consume, the zaibatsus make money.  
The zaibatsus are heretics. Enemies. They taught me that well in the entourage. They also taught me that the attitude of those who, through action or inaction, benefit in one way or another to their enemies is stupid, immoral, and reprehensible. Money, as the world is, is profit. Making the zaibatsus earn money is a benefit for the zaibatsus, for the enemy. The people of Kóverax took it upon themselves to make me assimilate that thoroughly and above all else.  
I consider anyone's Cromlyr process, the living-dying process, to be an absolutely wonderful thing. I believe that the world offers enough elements of interest to accumulate as many milliseconds-lives as possible. The accumulation of these is worth it despite not finding, at first glance, reasons. Experience tells me that, although such reasons are not found in the present tense, they may appear in the future.  
Therefore, according to me - according to me - suicide should never be an option to consider. According to me. And according to me now — now. According to the people of Kóverax it was different. It was more important to those in the entourage to screw up the enemy than to understand the potential possibilities of a live-die process.  
What I have just said, many people will understand it differently: "Those in the entourage were a bunch of crazy fanatics who washed your head and led you to suicide." Perhaps it was partly so. I will not deny it. But I can't blame them. Another rather stupid factor actually played a role in my suicide attempt, related to a certain childish stubbornness of mine and the lazy and lazy character I had as a child.  
To understand this better, it is necessary to go back to my first days of life in the castle of Kóverax.


	2. Enusor of Kóverax: Zombies (Part 2)

Suicide is not an option. This I learned over time, but it was not taught to me in Kóverax. That they did not teach me this in Kóverax is, for many people, a reason to justify that the people of Kóverax with whom I grew up were a bunch of degenerates, fanatics, sadists, intolerant and depraved who did not know how to value life and did not see it necessary teach their children not to commit suicide.  
It's okay. I will not deny it. The people of Kóverax were that. All of them lived in the most absolute depravity. All degenerates. Growing up with them meant becoming a degenerate. And that's why it was so wonderful to grow up among those people!  
I proudly consider myself a fucking degenerate. Not some degenerate who considers suicide an option — no longer — but many would be astonished to find that all the rumors circulating about me are more than true. My wickedness is far greater than the masses are capable of imagining.  
And it is totally appreciated that the people of Kóverax taught me to be all that. To be a sadist, a bigot, a murderer, a bloodthirsty, a pervert, a moral aberration, a neurotic, a despot, a monster, a maniac. What difference does it make that they didn't teach me to be a vitalist? What else about not being taught correctly about suicide? I already had time to learn it later. And, after all, I didn't die!  
The world must suffer the scourge of Enusor of Kóverax! Blessed coincidence that saved me!  
Chance! Earlier I said that my suicide attempt was actually the product of an absolute coincidence relative to my early years at Kóverax. Years that were, to tell the truth, a real delight. I devoted my milliseconds-life, conscientiously, to a single purpose: to loaf around as much as possible and clowing around. And there was no one to stop it!  
Later I would discover that in Heretic societies this was impossible. After all, having a child is a gruesome way of doing business. This was not the case with the people of Kóverax. Baeralas was the woman who gave birth to me, I have no idea who she slept with for it. It is also not relevant. But at no point did she consider me her "son" or her "possession". In fact, she often used to tell me how heretical it was.  
"No, Enusor, I am neither your mother nor my son," she said. "All of that is heretical terminology. Get away from it all. The moment Heretics begin to differentiate millisecond-life from millisecond-death, they begin to make millisecond-life hierarchies. They begin to consider that some 'lives' are worth more than others. That some individuals are worth more than others and that they deserve more privileges. The hierarchies they usually establish are insane and absurd; I'm not asking you to understand them, because no one sensible can understand them, but at least I want you to understand that they exist.  
»Of all the heretical and absurd hierarchies that all that scum has conceived, perhaps one of the dirtiest, most uncouth, and degrading is that of the patriarchy. It consists of assuming that a man is superior to a woman in every way and that woman is little more than a man's possession. That the millisecond-lives of men are worth more than the milliseconds-lives of women. The idea of 'family' and 'fatherhood' is absolutely aberrant, an absurd invention to perpetuate the existence of patriarchy. The man, by thinking that his milliseconds-life are worth more than those of the woman, establishes 'the family'. Considering that 'the woman is his' has, as a consequence, assuming that “everything that comes out of the woman is his”, including the children. And the set of women plus individuals born by that woman comprises 'the family', his 'possession', the empire over which he reigns. The family, in turn, is hierarchical. The man owns the woman and the children, and the woman, at the same time, owns her children. Thus, the woman acquires a status superior to that of her children, but not superior to that of the husband. However, a good way to prevent an oppressed from rebelling is to make that oppressed, in turn, oppress another person.  
»If I had been born among heretics, they would have instilled in me the idea that I was the possession of a 'mother', who was the possession of a 'father' of which, in turn, I was also a possession because I was before my 'mother'. This sounds confusing and insufferable gibberish, and I don't pretend to understand it well, but a Heretic may be willing to explain it better than I can. For all practical purposes, had I been born among Heretics I would not have been able to carry out my will. No. My wishes would be limited - apart from the zaibatsus, well - by the wishes of my 'father' in the first place, and my 'mother' in the second place. Children grow up like this. They don't do what they want; They have to check first what pleases their fathers, and then what pleases their mothers. If it occurs to them to disobey, retaliation of all kinds comes."  
Well, I wasn't born among people like that. My wishes were not limited by Baeralas or anyone. And it had consequences. Impossible consequences in a Heretic society. My will, at that time, was very clear. It was unthinkable in a "family": to be the biggest lazy man of all time!  
It occurs to the Heretics that children can become astonishingly interested in a live-die process based on the absurd accumulation of milliseconds-life, in the meaningless cycle of consuming-producing; in short, in the constant benefit of the zaibatsus in exchange for absolutely nothing. Heretics think that, so they feel entitled to decide for their children, and end up deciding that their live-die processes must be "productive." So there is no possibility of being lazy.  
Anyone will understand that the Kóverax people would not have much problem with the fact that I was lazy, however. Considering that they would rather see me dead than make money for a zaibatsu, they didn't care.  
A zaibatsu, by the way, is a macro-corporation with its own army. I highlight well the own army. The own armies are, without euphemisms, absolute power. And with absolute power, they can do whatever they want with the population. It is obvious that they consider "enemies" all those who do not bring them economic gain and who have plenty of means to eradicate them. The common people - the Heretics -, aware of the enormous power of the zaibatsus, do not consider it wise to have them as enemies. It is something like a suicide. But I have already said that the people of Kóverax did not have time to properly educate me about the downsides of suicide. Let us bear in mind that hatred was the main sentiment that governed his actions, perhaps at levels worthy of appearing in a psychiatrist's formulary. They weren't afraid to face such a powerful enemy. They had no qualms about waging a "suicidal" war; satisfying the dictates of his hatred was more important, even if it meant resuming a contest that had been lost for many years.  
Today, in a world of post-truths and science ruled by economics, there is no such thing as a "social history"; Each zaibatsu changes the history of the world at its convenience. The concern for empirical issues is nil. The consequences of this are easily imaginable; consideration in a given "world history" has become a matter of faith. Nobody has any idea what the world was like before the zaibatsus. Each clings to a version full of loopholes and void of empiricism. However, within the many versions, there are hierarchies and hierarchies. The vast majority of humans usually think that the world was created directly by the zaibatsus, so there was nothing before. The vast majority of dwarves and elves, on the other hand, tend to believe that before the zaibatsus the world was ruled by other forces and that the way to quantify the worth of each individual - if there were such quantifications - was not limited to be something purely economic.  
Elven and dwarf legends are not very detailed in this regard. There are only individual names. An elven warlord, Paidas. An enemy: Herlog, a bastard human sorcerer who locked up Paidas's host in another dimension until the end of time. Zaibatsus society established. Stupid story, right? I think the introductory video of any cliche RPG is better than what I just related. But what can we do? The elven people have nothing better to settle for. I already tell you, the world of post-truths and relativism. The history major disappeared from the university, like almost all studies in Letters, because, as everyone knows, studies in Letters are not profitable despite their usefulness.  
But in any case, suppose the Paidas story had been true. Paidas lost the war; Herlog won. The war is over and non-humans have been crushed in a beastly way. We elves end up infiltrating human society, enduring racism and heresy, and pretending to be one more. The dwarves ended up barricading themselves in their Futuralia City, which changes location all the time, becoming little more than a tourist attraction, receiving missgendering for all eternity. We lost the war, friends, we lost it before we were born. And that the bandits of Kóverax refused to accept this is not going to change the fact that the defeat was final. Their attitude is neither heroic nor noble; it's stupid. It's not worth giving up the chance of a life filled with wonderful elements in a wild attempt to resume a suicidal war.  
The people of Kóverax were stupid. I will never deny it. I spent my childhood surrounded by stupid people. But I will say something. It is not wise to be lazy in a world where lazy people are viewed as enemies by those who rule. But, even if it is not wise, to start a life as an absolute lazy man, it has, in my humble opinion, many more advantages than starting with ridiculous aspirations that will inevitably favor the zaibatsus.  
For example, understand that individuals classified as "lazy" do not have a "lower quality" than those classified as "productive." To understand, in fact, that it is absurd and heretical to apply quality standards to something like individuals. The concepts "better" and "worse" are individual perceptions, and as such, they are probably misperceptions. The Kóverax people did not consider that there could be individuals better than others; They did not consider, rather, that an individual could become, no matter how hard he tries, something more than that, an individual. Consequently, they also did not consider that a live-die process could "improve".  
Being legitimized to be a lazy person, and having the life of a lazy person for something pleasant and worthwhile, I proposed, since I could remember, to become the greatest lazy person of all time. I planned to spend the rest of my days sleeping until after three in the afternoon, eating pizza, hanging around the castle, teasing Dévhatan, playing stolen video games, reading some gruesome book, talking to the less boring people in the castle, and doing poetic bullshit like “feeling the wind breeze”, or bullshit like that. But nothing else. Nothing productive. I had no goals to meet, but no goals to fail at.  
It was a happy life and I could not imagine a life that could be better. Oddly, I couldn't imagine a life that could be worse either. If my lazy life was so good, it was due to a lack of needs. I didn't want anything, and with little, I was satisfied; that's how the Kóverax taught me. But because I didn't need to, I didn't need to extend my lazy life more than necessary. Being lazy obsessed me, obsessed me too much; I wanted a lifetime of being lazy, and it was beyond my pretense to "fight to become lazy." That would be paradoxical because the moment he “fought” for something he would stop being a lazy person.  
I wanted to spend my entire life fighting for absolutely nothing.  
And that's why I wanted to commit suicide being just a child!  
Watching the Heretics take over the castle, I knew that my lazy live-die process could not continue, so I was presented with two options. Either I went on living-dying in the company of Heretics, doing nasty stupid things and being forced to fight in order to remain lazy, or I would commit suicide and end my days lazy to the end. The first of the exits supposed a lengthening of the living-dying process, but, in return, I would have to go through a series of experiences that I did not feel like going through; the second, on the contrary, concluded with the live-die now process, perhaps in a hurry, but it saved me a lot of stupid things that I didn't feel like.  
A lengthening does not necessarily have to be an improvement; in my case, who did not even consider that there could be something like "an improvement", I had more reason to think so.  
Laziness got the better of me and I tried to blow my brains out just for that.  
Out of sheer laziness.


	3. Enusor of Kóverax: Zombies (Part 3)

But I didn't die. I woke up hours later in heretical surroundings. And from that moment on, I had infinite opportunities to commit suicide within my reach, but I missed them. Anyway, they had already screwed me up with my project of spending my entire life lounging around, what difference did it make to lengthen my live-die process a little longer? Perhaps I found something meritorious in Heretic society; after all, I knew little about that other world and it made me somewhat curious. Perhaps I found reasons to hate as much as Baeralas and the rest and ended up becoming fond of unwarranted cruelty as a compelling reason to prolong my live-die process.  
Of course, the first Heretic I had a relationship with came close to turning me into a resentful bastard as Baeralas; in fact, he partly got it. His name was Taepi, and he worked in the strange orphanage that they put me in. He was dedicated to brainwashing the orphaned children he fostered so that they would be liked by those who wanted to adopt them.  
Of course, no one was going to want to adopt a crazy child who wouldn't stop ranting hateful words towards others, which is what I did. The people of Kóverax came to teach me insults that were beyond the imagination of the most twisted Heretic. Actually, he had no idea what many of them meant, but it was obscenely funny to see the grimaces they made when he spoke them.  
As expected, Taepi was shocked by all these strings and suffered a lot. He didn't have much idea how to handle me, because he had never before been such a hostile kid as me. On many occasions, he would lose his cool and try to pin me on his girlfriend, an elf named Cirea. An elf! It took me quite a while to assimilate that there could be heretical elves; but once I had assimilated it, the very presence of her infuriated me.  
I always used to spit in her face after insulting her with all the cruelty that she had. This Cirea would burst into tears when that happened, and Taepi was screwed at exaggerated levels. They soon tried to change tactics with me, since the Heretics who wanted to adopt me, called Geiher and Raltia, were in a great hurry, and they were putting more and more pressure.  
So Taepi started something with me that he called “civilizing therapies,” but which were, in reality, torture, plain and simple. And it is not a childish exaggeration; they were fucking tortures. I speak with knowledge of the facts. Since I was a fucking microbe, I have always been witnessing torture in Kóverax, two-thirds of which were recorded for uploading to the internet. I have not only come to witness them, but also to participate in them.  
Therefore, when Taepi started these "therapies" with me, I knew exactly what he was doing. But in my case, Taepi was not trying to get information from me or send a message to anyone — as the Kóverax people did — but to make me, based on pure fear, end up accepting the behavior patterns that Raltia and Geiher wanted.  
No torture ever made me stop being a Cromlyrite cultist, but I never thought of myself as an asshole. Knowing how torture works, I was very aware that it was not convenient for me to be cool. A submissive and compliant attitude would be the best for him to leave me alone; after all, Geiher and Raltia couldn't be as abominable, not as abominable as Taepi's prick and his cowardly girlfriend Cirea. I thought so. I swear, I thought so.  
Ha!  
I had no fucking idea what was in store for me. I will say something. Growing up among neurotics who have no qualms about showing children how they torture to record snuff videos has certain advantages, in the sense that it prepares you for the crudest things in life, but they never prepared me for the filth that was thrown at me above.  
"Enusor," Taepi told me, once he was convinced that he had passed his fucking therapy, "this is your dad, Geiher, and this is your mom, Raltia."  
Things started well.  
Geiher tapped me on the shoulder and Raltia kissed and hugged me; No one in Kóverax had ever had that kind of gesture with me, but, to tell the truth, I didn't like them very much for the simple reason that they “took it for granted” that I was going to agree to that kind of contact. I just kept quiet and endured with resignation. I had no idea how I was going to get away from these people, but I would figure it out.  
"Well," I said, once we were in the car, away from that hellish orphanage, "then let's see what I find out. I then belong to you two, right? But you, Raltia, you belong to Geiher. So even though it belongs to both of you, I belong to Geiher more, right?"  
I swear I did not ask such questions in an attempt to unnerve anyone, or to push the buttons. I did not pretend to show the moral miseries of patriarchy and heretical society; I was just trying to review the clues that Baeralas had given me about that kind of life, to see if I remembered correctly. If I wanted to survive among Heretics, I had to understand his absurd regulations well. Yes, they were very absurd, but if I didn't comply they could kill me or something like that.  
However, my new "parents" did not interpret it that way. As soon as Geiher heard that, he slapped me. Raltia, on her part, began to cry like a mourning dove. She did not understand.  
"And what the hell is wrong with you?" Geiher roared, just before hitting her far more aggressively than me.  
I assumed, and not without reason, that I was before a very clear example of the heretical concept that Baeralas referred so much to: patriarchy. Later I would realize this matter was more serious than I thought. Raltia, my “mother”, belonged to a very powerful lineage of sorcerers, the Chosen-Ones, and she had the power to strike Geiher several times; however, she did not, but she indulged endless disrespect to each more gruesome. And I was forced to endure seeing such nonsense over and over again, unable to do anything, although on certain occasions I tried to convince Raltia of the underlying infamy in all that:  
"Raltia, you are very strong. You control a lot of magic. You have to kill Geiher! And your power is so strong that you can erase all the evidence, so that the police do not find out about anything."  
Then she told me that no, that she loved Geiher, and that because she loved him she should forgive everything and respect him; that I was a bad son for wishing my father's death and for pretending to use my mother to achieve that death. And then she would tell Geiher everything, and he would get mad and start paying her off with successive beatings. Afterwards, almost always — when Geiher had time — the beatings would go to me; And if I did not develop something of childhood trauma, it was because growing up in an environment as unstructured and macabre as Kóverax Castle gave me forever a certain vital coolness that would be very useful to most mortals.  
A few more such situations helped me to admit that, even against my expectations, living with Geiher and Raltia was far worse than living with Taepi. I intended, of course, to get out of there, but Raltia's sorcery managed to thwart all my attempts to escape, which were not few.  
I was going through a situation that was familiar to me long before: that of the prisoner. In Kóverax we had had countless prisoners to torture and curse for various purposes; The lives they led under our clutches were terrible, but it would have been with great pleasure that I had exchanged for them because a live-die process with that marriage involved unimaginable infamies even in an environment as hostile as Kóverax.  
I speak, above all, of that absurd desire to redecorate reality that Geiher and, above all, Raltia had. When in Kóverax we took prisoners, they were that, prisoners; We never try to make them go through something else, or interpret reality in another way. They were prisoners who were going to get screwed a lot, and who had to obey us for fear that we would kill them, plain and simple. I was that too, a prisoner who had to obey, because I had no other choice; However, I was forced to endure a kind of abominable hypocrisy, such as the following:  
"We are your parents, and we love you, and if we hurt you, it is for your good. But we cannot allow you to continuously disrespect us, because we are your parents and we deserve respect."  
With similar phrases, I can understand that in the Heretic world there is a different concept of "respect." For the people of Kóverax, "respect" was explained in opposition to fear; you respected someone when you were inclined to obey and please them completely voluntarily; however, you feared it when obedience was solely the product of a desire not to suffer that person's wrath. Respect could not be forced; fear could be forced, and that was, in fact, what my parents — legally speaking — were doing.  
However, the Kóverax never forced fear on me; those people would be crazy, but they gave themselves mutual respect. They would scold me, but I could scold them too, and my voice was taken into account as much as that of any other inhabitant of the castle despite my young age. The fact that I was supported and fed in Kóverax never served as an excuse for imposing anything against my will. Geiher and Raltia, in theory, were much more stable mentally, but to my faith that mental stability inevitably involved prejudices against me.  
The days went by like this until September arrived, and with it, an unknown phenomenon to me: the “back to school”.  
He did not know what "the school" could be for sure. In Kóverax they never told me about it, but I immediately assumed that it must be something bad because Geiher and Raltia were very excited that I was attending something that for me was not so much a return as a start.  
I was really right to assume that!


	4. Enusor of Kóverax: Zombies (Part 4)

In Kóverax I had had plenty of opportunities to learn what a zombie was. Dévhatan possessed a whole retinue of these beings; He invoked them, in theory, to collaborate in military actions with his companions, but most of the time he spent it showing off about the amount of those disgusting critters that he could invoke.  
The zombies smelled bad and moved pathetically; their very presence was disgusting, for being full of pus, sores, and various mutilations. They also made me very nervous, constantly moving from one place to another with the most absolute parsimony, completely lacking in will.  
Ultimately, they produced more disgust than fear, and I recriminated Dévhatan a lot for placing them everywhere, but he never paid much attention to me. So I started a kind of guerrilla war with him; Since he couldn't stop zombies from being in every fucking room in the castle, I spent most of my time stoning and harassing them, and they could never reliably defend themselves.  
I remember once Dévhatan got so mad at me that in the middle of the night he sent at least twenty zombies to rip me out of bed and drag me to the top of the castle, where the necromancer himself threatened to throw me out of there and kill me if I kept boycotting his zombies; I couldn't defend myself well because he had enchanted them with some spell of power and speed. However, far from taking it as an endpoint, I assimilated it as an affront, and I took my work of annoying the zombies much more seriously, declaring a kind of civil war that never ended because of the massacre of the RaskoCOPS.  
All this long excursion was motivated by my need to explain that I was already familiar with zombies, beings suspiciously close to heretics. They have many attributes in common, but especially a lack of will. In that abominable place called college, I learned it well; Almost none of my classmates seemed to have instincts of their own, but rather to move to the beat of fashion, television, teachers, and parents. The main difference is that the zombies of Dévhatan acted this way as a result of necromantic magic, while that of the Heretics was pure apathy and stupidity.  
The fact that they didn't mount a fucking rebellion in that pseudo-prison called school was the ultimate proof of that. It seemed to me that I was in a mithril mine or something like that, but I felt unable to obey, so I spent the classes clowning and annoying my classmates, just like in the days of yore I annoyed the zombies of Dévhatan. For the zaibatsus, whom I followed — and would continue to — regard as my enemies.  
I, therefore, made it clear that I had no intention of obeying the dictates of my teachers; Whether this was more or less prudent seemed irrelevant at that time, because any option seemed more attractive to me than spending long hours copying absurd texts. Curiously, I was not the only one who decided to adopt that attitude in class; on the contrary, there were many of us nonconformists who saw better any other option than to abide by the dictates of the teacher.  
With all this, I was already getting used to the idea of the undeniable feeling of superiority of adults over children, although I discovered definitive evidence that removed all possible doubts.  
It was when Raltia decided to adopt another child, “a little brother”, when she saw that the feelings of filial affection that she so eagerly awaited would never come from me. To avoid adopting someone like me again, she decided to opt for a younger one, whom she could indoctrinate from such a young age, whom she could manipulate to force her affection.  
His name was Isludgar. I think he was two or three years old; I don't remember much else, but I will never forget Raltia's attitude towards him. I was very struck by the fact that she was constantly trying to communicate with such a small child, that she had not developed language, and that she could not understand him. He constantly used a characteristic form of speech, the maternal, which seemed to be something like the greatest of nonsense. It consisted, basically, of addressing the child as if he were an adult with brain problems, gesturing exaggeratedly and using ridiculous expressions that nobody uses in everyday life. They made me very nervous because I didn't understand his purpose. Talking to the child as if he were stupid was not going to make the child understand her, nor was it going to speed up her language learning. At Kóverax, children were never treated as valid interlocutors until they reached a certain age; from then on, they spoke to them like any other adult, and they could develop language without problems.  
Anyway, understand that in the heretical world children had no voice or vote, it was one of the most rewarding lessons. I knew since then that if I wanted to escape Geiher and Raltia's house somehow, I would have to wait a little longer. A terrible difference from Kóverax. At first, I had serious doubts as to whether I could endure so many years in such an unpleasant and purposeless environment; however, thank heaven there were certain positive events that made some of those years more bearable for me.  
Anyone can imagine that, given my character and my intense disgust towards everything, it was not very easy for me to make friends at school. So it was, because, to tell the truth, I found it much more exciting to antagonize people. With such uninteresting people, enmity was the only way to achieve a fruitful relationship. There was, however, one exception; his name was Zérix, a kid I met in punishment classrooms, as conflictive and unruly as I was.  
If this individual caught my eye above the mediocre mortals around me, it was for various reasons. I really liked the lonely air he always brought in, scorning people he didn't suit, always preferring to be isolated on the playground to participating in the stupid games of others. In that sense, he was like me, and that attracted me a lot, but what prompted me to take the first step forward was a certain drawing that I saw him make once we were punished. He looked like an elf.  
"Is that an elf?" I asked for.  
"It's Paidas, the most powerful elf commander of all time!"  
I was very surprised that a human boy could even know Paidas's name. In class, they told us little about the history and traditions of the elves, and if they did it was from the point of view of humans, full of prejudices and misinformation. I remember they told us about Cromlyr once. About Cromlyr! They told us something like that he was an elven deity that the elves worship; in short, they branded all the elves of us stupid religious.  
"Professor, Cromlyr is not a deity! Elves are atheists! Cromlyr is a concept! The cromlyrite cult is a point of view, not a religion!"  
That, of course, earned me no recess again.  
But that boy knew Paidas. Paidas! The name of Cromlyr could be known by anyone, but someone who knew Paidas must have had some kind of somewhat greater relationship with elves.  
"I've always been told stories about him when I was younger, as a good elf that I am!" I replied.  
"About him? He replied, without looking up from his drawing. "About him? Him? You use the wrong pronoun! Paidas was not a man! It's they/them! They/them is the right pronouns!"  
I had no idea what he was telling me, but his knowledge of elven culture seemed so great that he wanted to compete with mine. That boy really deserved my attention.  
"Wow," I said, "I've been told a lot of stories about him… about him, but I didn't know that detail."  
"Stories? Have they not sung you romances?"  
"What is a romance?"  
Then, for the first time, he turned to me, and sang the following:

Then Paidas faced  
To the minions of Herlog,  
With anger and burning pride,  
And exalted thoughts:  
"Perhaps you have defeated  
To mighty warriors  
And full of vanity  
You boast that, therefore,  
You are the one to prejudge,  
But nothing gives you the right  
To treat me that way,  
With a thousand disrespect.  
I was born non-binary  
I am still non-binary,  
I am neither a man nor a woman,  
Nor do I intend to be.  
And you better accept  
My preferences, well I think  
That you may not know  
That my character is fierce,  
That my sword is powerful  
And devastates like fire  
That of my rare pronouns  
In the past, they already laughed,  
But everyone, without exception  
They ended up more than dead.

I'll be honest: he didn't sing well. He didn't sing well at all. But that poetry was interesting. In Kóverax no one had recited or sung poetry about Paidas to me, nor had anyone told me that Paidas was of "non-binary gender".  
"Do you know any elves?"  
"I live with an elf!"  
"Is he your foster brother?"  
"Do not! He is my friend!"  
It was all very weird. But the boy's life seemed to be, with little, much better than mine.  
"Do you live with a friend? No parents to fuck you?"  
Then, Zérix looked that they did not hear us, and he leaned close to my ear to speak in a low voice.  
"My friend pretends to be my father at school meetings. But don't tell anyone. I don't want them to know."  
That was the beginning of something good. I ended up becoming quite friends with Zérix. That made my school sessions a little more enjoyable. Enjoyable? Perhaps that is a very exaggerated word. Saying "less insufferable" seems more appropriate. Zérix and I had a lot in common, and we developed a fairly strong emotional relationship, but negative stimuli were considerably predominant at that time in my life. The treatment of the teachers was increasingly dire. They did things to Zérix and me that were even comparable to Taepi's torture.  
But worst of all, I had to give thanks for entering school and being able to escape the horrors of my home. Later I will talk about Zérix's house and how lucky he was to live with that "elf friend"; For now, it is enough to know that his situation could not match mine by far. Geiher's mistreatment went from bad to worse. And when there was no troubling moment, the tension was continuous. The meals were apocalyptic. There were not even topics of conversation that could relax this monstrosity in the least.  
Zérix was my only confidant. Talking to him about my problems was invaluable. He was always understanding and caring. And, naive as it sounds, willing to find solutions.  
"You can come to my house whenever you want. Flargan, my elf friend, will not mind."  
"Geiher won't let me. I am prohibited from leaving the house. They only let me out for classes. And even for that, they send a robot to watch me!"  
"Tell your parents to come and see my house. Tell them to come to dinner. Flargan knows how to act very well. They will trust him."  
It sounded crazy, but I didn't have much else to lose. That same day I mentioned it during lunchtime.  
"A friend told me if we want to go to his house to dinner."  
"A friend?" Geiher replied. "Since when do you have friends? Another thug, like you? Maybe it's the cause of your academic failure. Your grades are dire, and we don't want them to get even worse."  
"Geiher, darling, he didn't have any friends until now," Raltia said sheepishly. "We should be happy about it, right? It can't be very healthy to be without friends at school. It can degenerate into depression and derivative problems. I don't want our son to end up being antisocial."  
"Who the hell asked you to open your fucking mouth?" Her beloved Geiher replied. "No, Enusor, we are not going to eat with that friend of yours. What's more, I'll talk to the teachers so that they separate you from him as much as possible. We don't want any more fails in your qualifications."  
I said earlier that I didn't have much else to lose. That's what I thought, really. But at this point in the conversation, I really regretted having thought that.  
"Honey, the idea of talking to the teachers sounds great to me," Raltia continued, on the verge of an anxiety attack, "but I think first we should see if his friend is really as troublesome as we think. What if he is a normal kid? That might help you forget about the madmen in Kóverax. Come on, why don't we accept that invitation? Just to see what the child is like and what his parents are like. If we don't like it, we talk to the teachers; and if things get worse, we can even file a complaint."  
When I saw Geiher grab Raltia by the chest, I began to imagine that he was playing the beating of the day. It took a long time. As usual, I would be next. But not. He simply just looked at her threateningly and said the following:  
"We will go, but if I see something I don't like, you will use your Chosen-One powers and destroy their house, is that clear? This way, you do something useful in a fucking time, instead of hitting your balls so much."  
And when it seemed that things could not get worse, that happened. They had discarded the idea of parting with my only friend, but now an even more gruesome one was emerging. An explosion in his house as they saw something they do not like! As an asshole Geiher was, any detail could serve as an excuse. As he did not like the color of the wall or something like that, we had it, especially considering that he was already with a more than horrible predisposition towards my friend and his family.  
So I told Zérix the next day. He surprised me that his reaction wasn't freaking out.  
"Do not worry! It's all in control! Flargan knows how to act very well. There will not be any problem. They will be happy and they will let you hang out with me all you want."  
The day of truth has finally arrived. It was a Saturday at noon. After my parents left Isludgar in charge of well-trained babysitting robots, we got in the car, and Geiher put the address of Zérix's house into the GPS.  
"Those people better have a minimally decent home. We don't want you to get involved with the rabble, Enusor. As I see that they live in a filthy hut, I will ask Raltia to destroy them without even passing by."  
Geiher's expectations were dire even when it came to the quality of the home. This is why he was so greatly surprised to discover that Zérix lived in a damned better house than ours. And I say well that damn better.  
This was a fucking palace!  
It was, of course, twice the size of our home. Swimming pool, tennis and basketball court, recreation room, gigantic garden ... And a minimalist design where white prevailed and every detail of the house inspired luxury, cleanliness,ga and neatness. Flargan had money, a lot of money. More than Geiher and Raltia could earn together.  
And I do not know if I have commented that, separately, both of them won a lot of money, Geiher in the agency and Raltia in the power plant.  
Where the hell was that “elf friend” of Zérix working on?


	5. Enusor of Kóverax: Zombies (Part 5)

Rasko, like the vast majority of zaibatsus, often uses propaganda to make people believe that life under his rule is infinitely better. This propaganda almost always presents the stereotype of a completely happy and cliché family, that is, a perfect and functional marriage with innocent and happy children living in a dream home. The absurd and unattainable stereotype that most of the time used to bring depressions and things like that by being contrasted with the lives of normal people.  
That's why I was so surprised to find myself not faced with something like the stereotype, but with the same fucking stereotype. That was what they looked like. Suddenly, my indomitable friend Zérix became a gentle and docile child. And his supposed elf friend of his was nowhere to be found.  
In his place were two very kind lords, fully human. They were cordial, they smiled nonstop, and they displayed an education that I found repulsive. I was outraged.  
"Good morning," said the man, a slightly older, receding, clean-shaven guy. "My name is Vitz. This is my wife, Kéria, and this is my son Zérix. It is a pleasure that you have agreed to come to dinner. Please have a seat at the table. My robots are serving the dishes."  
But what the fuck. I kept looking at Zérix with reproachful and stupefied glances, but he didn't even listen to me. Geiher, however, was delighted. He was amazed that my only friend from school turned out not to be a lost person, but the son of such a formal family with so much money. I was disappointed.  
Where was the fucking elf friend? Where was Flargan?  
The food was awful. They would not let him or me speak. However, our parents hit it off quite a bit.  
"And what do you guys do to have a heritage like that?" Geiher asked as soon as he had a chance, somewhat impolite.  
"Mainly the textile industry," Vitz replied, not in the least offended. "We got to occupy high positions in RaskoClothes, but a couple of years ago we sold our shares and we are currently investing in the stock market. And you?"  
"I lead an agency," Geiher replied quickly, placing an exaggerated emphasis on 'lead'.  
Raltia didn't answer anything. She knew that if she did, there would be negative consequences, and she preferred to avoid speaking up in that conversation. But she couldn't escape so easily.  
"What do you do, Raltia?" Kéria asked with all the respect in the world.  
"I work at a power plant," Raltia began shyly.  
"She works," Geiher remarked annoyed, "she doesn't direct it."  
"Are you not Chosen-One?" Said Vitz. "Being Chosen-One I don't think you're an ordinary worker at the plant."  
Geiher shot her a menacing look. Raltia couldn't look up from the plate of peas. And meanwhile, Vitz was looking at her with that fucking grinning face. I, for my part, wanted to die. It was something relatively common for me at that age, for the record.  
"I'm supplying power to the plant," Raltia finally declared. "Using my power ... Using only my electrical magic is enough to supply energy to RaskoCentral and a large number of nearby towns. The energy is produced solely by me, and the rest of the employees are solely responsible for storing, managing and distributing it."  
"Oh, but that's fantastic!" Exclaimed Vitz, with that ridiculous and absurd optimism. "You must win pretty well! Are you not satisfied with the work of his wife, Geiher? Are you not satisfied to think, what do I know, that the robots that are serving us drink right now work thanks to the energy that your wife generates in an unlimited way by that natural gift of yours?"  
"Oh, of course, my wife's natural gift is fantastic," Geiher said sardonically, "but her other natural gift for fucking young men at work is not so great. Do you believe yourself, Vitz? She could be applying for a much better position. She could run the central if she wanted, from an office, without being in contact with anyone. But no, she prefers to work hand in hand with motherfuckers that she is surely fucking herself. And does she know the worst, Vitz? That the feminazis call me misogynist for getting angry at these situations! Misogynist! Misogynist me!  
If something like a theatrical harmony between families had been generated, typical only of Rasko's expansionist propaganda pamphlets, he had just gone to hell with that comment right now.  
That, at least, I imagined. But the reality was different. Neither Vitz nor Kéria were uncomfortable with Geiher's comments. Quite the opposite. They laughed at her as if she had told a harmless childish joke and changed the subject. In two minutes everything was forgotten and that very correct formal meal continued without incident. Well, that if you ignored the fact that that social gathering was, in itself, a mishap.  
"Well, we're really delighted that our Zérix has finally made a friend at school. We are very grateful to you and your son for that."  
"Oh, the gratitude is ours," Geiher said. "Our Enusor was in a very similar situation. We were overjoyed to learn that he was no longer alone."  
But? You almost killed me at the time, but now it turns out that he "filled you with joy." That pantomime of lies and hypocrisy grew in infamy for every minute that was spent there. I even cursed the fact of having met Zérix, and tried to find an explanation for why he was lying. As far as I knew, I hadn't done anything to that boy to make him want to trick me into that cruelty.  
"It turns out our Zérix has serious mental problems," Vitz lamented, not showing the slightest compunction about the fact that 'his Zérix' was sitting next to him. "Birth problems, fundamentally. You know, the issue of care. He is unable to concentrate or perform in class. We have tried various spells, medications, and psychologists, but nothing has worked so far. We tried alternative medicine too, you know, but more of the same. The truth is that we recently bought a psychologist robot that is helping him to progress significantly."  
Geiher felt like an alcoholic in a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. His new friend Vitz understood him in everything and was excessively condescending to any stupidity.  
"I understand you, I understand you," he answered, with a goofy smile. "Our son has similar attention problems. How much do you say that robot psychologist costs you?"  
Wonderful. Before Geiher met his beloved Vitz, I was a "fucking bum." After meeting him, he simply had "attention problems." If Geiher's idea was to agree with Vitz on fucking everything, why the hell didn't he give Zérix's father for saying I was God and he was a fucking wimp who had to suck my cock?  
"Don't worry about that. I think that a double therapy could be very effective with the robot psychologist. You can bring your child to this house everything you need and use my robot as many times as you like. The children will appreciate it very much."  
"That's a great idea!" Geiher exclaimed, as if he were a child opening presents on his birthday. "I had thought of sending my Enusor to a reformatory, but his idea of the robot seems to be much faster and cheaper for us. Do not hesitate to stop by my agency! The first service will be free!"  
"Oh, very kind!"  
I do not know. The idea of reformatory was unbelievably more attractive to me than living with fucking Geiher. But now he had just screwed up everything. Damn Zérix, why did you do that to me? Why did he give you for lying to me and for telling me strange things about an elf friend that does not exist?  
The explanation came to me suddenly, sooner than I expected.  
"Look," Vitz was saying, "our Zérix's mental problems got to the point where he believed he had an imaginary friend. The elf Flargan! He kept talking about that elf Flargan! But with the help of our robot psychologist, he is beginning to pass. It is incredibly useful!"  
Fucking. There I had my explanation. Served cold. Without anesthesia. No anal lubricant.  
Now is the time to say "game over, try again", right?  
I shot Zérix a murderous look. He ignored me. Fuck. Fuck! The meal was coming to an end, but before that our parents agreed that that same afternoon I would stay there making use of that perfect psychologist robot.  
The meal concluded, but not before Geiher and Vitz agreed that I would spend that afternoon in that house to test a first session of the services of that torturer robot. It was not really clear if it was worse than or a fateful afternoon at my house, enduring how Raltia and I were humiliated over and over again because of the untimely nature of that jealous abuser.  
Geiher and Raltia left, and I was, for the first time, alone with Zérix and his family. My sadness was such that I did not even have the strength to issue a single reproach.  
Vitz, at that moment, got up from his seat and approached me with a determined bearing and with a somewhat unusual expression in his eyes, as if he had suddenly been possessed by some kind of strange spirit.  
"Well," he said, "it's time to end this charade, right?"  
He smiled in amusement and, without the slightest scruple, he tore the skin in front of me, starting from his face all the way to his feet.  
I have to specify that I am not exaggerating when I say “the skin”. No, that demon elf was not simply wearing a costume. This was quite a powerful spell. Flargan, for a few hours, had been transformed into a fucking human. And he had believed it. And, most importantly, my adoptive parents too. But now that they were gone, for the first time, he had the opportunity to contemplate the true aspect of the owner of that house.  
His bearing had nothing to do with that of the fictitious textile industry tycoon and stock market investor whom he was playing a few minutes earlier; if they were alike in something, it was in that proud, elegant, and haughty character that is usually typical of people who handle large amounts of money. Flargan was, like Vitz, a rich man, a millionaire, but another kind of rich man. He did not have the look of the typical boring narcissist who spends all his millions reinforcing his role as the perfect and highly educated father of a family. He was different, something closer to the dandy; he gave the impression of being some kind of skull whose fortune he had not led to a centered life but to a display of eccentricities each more capricious. His features, from the outset, showed a much greater and exquisite degree of refinement, not only because he was an elf, but also because of the obsessive care he showed for having smooth skin, made up and pale to the point of death, pronounced and sharp angles, and an excessively extravagant trimmed goatee. But even more extravagant were his clothes, in very bright colors, full of materials that should only be found online and at not exactly low prices. He couldn't tell if he looked like something out of a horror movie or a children's movie.  
"Ha!" He roared, in a completely different voice. "Amazed? Amazed, friends, at my excellent performance? Ha! A prize! They should give me a fucking prize! Am I not the best actor in the world? Stupid film production companies who refused to hire me as an actor! A prize! A fucking prize I deserve! Do I fucking deserve it or not?"  
"But ..." I whispered, without leaving my astonishment "Your wife, Kéria ... she ...? Who ... who the hell is she?"  
Kéria remained impassive in the face of everything that was happening, without changing one iota, her gaze lost in space. Flargan burst into histrionic, exaggerated laughter and enthusiastically pounced on the head of Vitz's supposed wife.  
"My wife! My wife!" He yelled madly. "Wife! Did you hear yourself right? How is this pot going to be my wife?"  
The more he banged "poor" Kéria's head against the table, the better he discovered the truth of the whole thing. His skin was beginning to sag, revealing a myriad of electronic microchips and metal plates. Her "wife" was nothing more than a robot who had the proper enchantments applied.  
Zérix, seeing my expression of extreme amazement, couldn't stop laughing.  
"You've believed everything, everything, everything!" he said to me, "Just like Geiher! Just like the teachers!"  
"The teachers! The teachers!" Flargan said. "At parents' meetings I reenact the charade that I performed today over and over again, and they believe it!" They believe it, Enusor, they believe it! My robot and I are thought to be Zérix's parents! I, the father of Zérix! Zérix's father! You know, Enusor? Zérix's father is dead! Zérix's parents are dead! I killed them! Me! I killed his parents! I killed his parents!"  
He then began to skip around the room, continuing to roar with mad laughter. Zérix did not seem to be inspired by the slightest horror of living with the murderer of his parents and that he was laughing at it in his face; in fact, Zérix himself was laughing too.  
"I killed her parents, man, I killed her parents!"  
Seeing my enormous confusion, my friend rushed to give me an explanation.  
"My parents were just as motherfuckers as yours, or surely more. But Flargan killed them and now I don't have to put up with them."  
But my astonishment remained, not so much because of Zérix's feelings about his parents, but because of the fact that the law did nothing in the face of such an event. It sounded good that a savior from heaven would come, kill your parents and give you the opportunity for a better life in his company; but, as far as I knew, the laws did not allow such a thing. At least Rasko's. All these doubts I expressed to Flargan without further delay. He, still laughing, gave me no other explanation than the following:  
"I'm a knight errant, man! I distribute justice with an iron arm! I am above the law!" He said, not caring about my disbelief regarding the existence of a supposed institution that supposedly is 'above the law' "And, I swear, I wish I could also take your adoptive father. That Geiher prick would be better off dead… But, regretting it, that's beyond my power. I am a knight-errant and above the law, but I am not above the Chosen-One. And killing Geiher would be synonymous with facing Raltia. I'm sorry, kid, but a person who powers the whole fucking city is out of my reach. I've already had bad experiences with Chosen-Ones in the past ... And, well, if I'm still alive it's pure miracle. But boy, relax! Look, a certain Paidas romance comes to mind that I didn't even think about for this occasion.  
And he sang - in a voice, by the way, much better than Zérix's -:

On this terrible day  
My hosts are defeated,  
But I know that my enemies  
They will never come to anything.  
No matter how much power they have  
Your victories will be expensive,  
Because this life is fleeting  
And all the glory is vain  
And to those who boast  
Of the victories collected  
It will hurt them enormously  
The inevitable arrival  
Of the millisecond death,  
No one will ever avoid it!  
As much as they defeat me  
Against Cromlyr nobody wins.

His melodious voice, his knowledge of the Cromlyrite cult, and his intentions about killing my foster parents were enough to win Flargan the greatest of my sympathies. After all, everything had turned out fine. I was staying with my best friend, Zérix, and I had just won another friend. And Geiher allowed it. Not only did he consent to it, but he intended to allow me new meetings with those new friends of mine, under the excuse that he was attending the sessions of a supposed psychologist robot.  
"It's not that bad," I said. "Now I don't have to spend so much time in that house. And well, the romance is right. No one is strong enough to be above Cromlyr, because Cromlyr is the natural order of things and no one is above that."  
"Glad you got that worldview, kid. Chromlyrite stoicism is good for knowing how to fit in certain situations. But just because I can't kill your parents doesn't mean I can't do anything to get you out of your situation."  
I was skeptical, but I let Flargan continue.  
"You see, this robot I've been hitting just now… well, it's pretty tough and hasn't really deteriorated. And it has several functions. You can pretend to be something, but you can also use your eyes as a camcorder. And a camcorder, by the way, pretty good. It is useful in espionage missions. With all this, I want to tell you that Geiher's behavior towards his wife has been recorded. And not just behavior! Several of Raltia's scars as well. As hard as you try to cover them up, my robot's camera is very powerful."  
"And that?"  
I was getting lost. I didn't follow him. He did not understand where he wanted to go.  
"You see, I suppose you know that gender violence law is fucking rubbish today in almost any domain. Let's say that the zaibatsus do not benefit financially from justice and that it is even more profitable for them to spread gender violence than to censor it. Anyway, if you are going to report a case, the safest thing is that they will pass your fucking face. There is an army of outraged mysoginist who constantly affirm that most of the complaints are false… The picture is complicated, but if you carry irrefutable evidence, the RaskoCOPS usually do not pass you. And what I have obtained today in this meal thanks to my robot is irrefutable proof."  
Then I briefly commented on the panorama. I told him about the number of friends and neighbors who had tried to report the situation at my house with dire results. I told him about the casual deaths that all these people had after their complaints with irrefutable evidence, and the situation that many of the RaskoCOPS in charge of the issue of gender violence are currently experiencing. Those from the local police station - and many others - were under threat. Raltia herself had promised to give them a slow and painful death as it occurred to them to pay the slightest attention to whoever came to them with complaints and "irrefutable evidence."  
"Well," Flargan told me after I told him everything, "the situation is, uh, worse than I thought. I think that, indeed, it will be of no use that I denounce. But, oh Cromlyr, I never imagined a more dire case. A woman alienated to the point of wanting to prolong an abuse situation to infinity, rejecting all possible help?"  
"I dont know. Raltia says that when she is in love with her those things are done."  
"Look, Enusor, I believe you, okay?" Zérix had told me everything. "But he is so bizarre… I can't quite take it in if I tell you the truth. Perhaps I have moved through different environments, in which if someone gets beaten up, that someone wants them to stop being like that."  
"Already. I do not know. They are rare. Sometimes it is Raltia who asks Geiher to beat him up."  
This in question I had not told Zérix either, who looked at me in amazement.  
"This is new? He, "he said," but it doesn't make any sense! How are you going to ask him to beat you up?"  
"I do not know. They say it is a kind of game called BDSM."  
Flargan was shocked to hear that, but he tried to avoid giving it too much importance. Little by little, he was recovering the haughty and optimistic attitude of the beginning.  
"Enusor, you may think that as a knight errant I am a failure because I cannot do anything about the injustices that plague your home. But believe me, I know that your case may be the most serious of all Rasko and that you need help whatever. You have to put up with it. I won't tell you to be strong, it seems like an stupid advice to me. I only ask that you do not kill yourself before you turn eighteen. And do not be angry, I have not prejudged you or seen in you traits that may indicate suicidal tendencies. But that a boy like you, living in the house where he lives, ends up wanting to shoot himself ... And, well, at least you entered that house when you grew up. Your previous life, in the company of cromlyrites, had to be better. They sure taught you to be strong. But your brother Isludgar? That is psychiatric meat, you'll see. Just like Zérix. His parents were two rich freak addicts, like me, but addicted to the strangest drugs. If you had not killed them, your dear Zérix would now be cutting his veins."  
Zérix nodded with great conviction. I was amused.  
"It's true! I would be cutting my veins! And I would record it on video to upload it to the internet!"  
The hypothetical situation even seemed funny to him. Blessed innocence. Who could go back to a time when the macabre seemed funny to us without having to resort to black humor?  
"Anyway," Flargan continued, "I find it difficult to help your brother. But with you it is different. If you make it to eighteen without killing yourself along the way, we can do something. Geiher and Raltia will no longer have rights over you, and you can do whatever you want. And I'll take care to find a way for you and Zérix to survive. Remember: hold on without committing suicide. If he helps you, you can come to our house whenever you want. I think your parents bought into the psychology robot act pretty well. Although I in your place would avoid not messing it up too much in class. Zérix can do whatever he wants, that nothing will happen to him, but your case is different. If the teachers complain a lot, no one knows how Geiher will react. That man is unbalanced, believe me. A guy who has no qualms about practicing BDSM with his wife in front of his adopted son is capable of shooting his own son if he fails math. Trust me, a knight errant like me has seen it all."  
The day did not end badly. A new friend. A slight hope. A new reason to live. For which to endure a few years without committing suicide.  
Blessed innocence ...


	6. Enusor of Kóverax: Zombies (Part 6)

I then entered a fleeting and precious time of prosperity. The soporific classes and the beatings they gave us at home were no longer so difficult to bear if you thought that I was expecting a pleasant afternoon in the company of the people I really cared about: Zérix and Flargan.  
With Zérix my relationship was growing. Being able to see each other after class helped strengthen our bonds. In addition, his house was gigantic and we could run as much as we wanted through an endless number of corridors and rooms. Flargan did not mind at all that we stained or soiled. He always had a practically inexhaustible mine of robots and money to repair everything.  
By the way, I asked myself more often than he should have been where all of Flargan's money came from. He was too quirky and enigmatic to speak out about it. He always got around to me:  
"The money? Oh, I am a knight errant! Knights Errant are never short of money!"  
"But let's see that it clears me up! Are you a knight-errant, a textile industry mogul, or a stockbroker?"  
"Dear Enusor, to be a true knight errant one must be prepared for everything in life. As soon as knights-errant we must be tycoons of the textile industry as soon as we must be stockbrokers. However, the efficiency of a knight errant with full pockets is usually far better than that of a raggedy with empty pockets. Experience tells me."  
My conversations with Flargan used to be this cryptic. Ah, Flargan! After the first contact I had with him, when he bragged about being the murderer of Zérix's parents, my expectations were totally different from what later ended up being a reality. I expected him to be some kind of quirky sadist, something akin to Baeralas or Dévhatan. Then I realized that no. Had he been a quirky sadist, I wouldn't have cared — Geiher would always be worse — but he wasn't. He pretended to be, if anything, but his heart was pure goodness. He had killed people, he probably kept killing and had the intention of killing again, but something told me that he never killed those who did not deserve it. In that sense, he was different from the people I grew up with. About that, by the way, we once had a conversation:  
"The bandits of Kóverax? I know who they were. I know who almost all the cromlyrites are who have lived and still live in the Rasko Domain. And what do you want me to say. They mustn't be too Cromlyrite when they didn't teach you to call Paidas by his real pronouns. They didn't even sing a single Paidas romance to you! And you say they were mostly elves? What kind of elf repudiates their traditions in this way?"  
"But they told me about Paidas. They taught me to hate heretics."  
"To hate!" A bunch of sadists and torturers, that's what they were. I hope I do not offend you. Trust me, heretics are usually like that too. Maybe Kóverax's were a little better, but that doesn't make them good. To loot, kill and torture as a way of unleashing an absurd hatred, is it not, perhaps, ridiculous? To hell with all that Inquisition stuff. It is nothing more than a macabre tale to justify the fun four wankers addicted to snuff. No, cavalry errant is a straighter and more praiseworthy path for every self-respecting cromlyrite."  
That he showed such contempt for Kóverax's was something that made me very angry. That idiot people like Taepi or Geiher attacked them I did not care. But to see that Baeralas and company were looked down upon by another cromlyrite elf? Oh, that hurt, I think so.  
"They taught me that the cromlyrite cult was that no one is better than anyone. They did all of those things, but they were no worse than you."  
"Oh, wow! Don't you notice the cynicism in her attitude? They consider that no one is better than anyone, but they see no problem torturing people without rhyme or reason! Isn't that a hypocritical way of believing yourself superior to the other by being able to torture them?"  
"You killed Zérix's parents!"  
"Of course I killed them! By just one hit! I did it precisely because I did not consider myself superior to Zérix. I did not consider myself superior, and therefore it did not seem fair to allow him to grow up in such an abominable family. But ah, Cromlyrite morality is twisted and complicated. In theory, everything is beautiful. In practice ... Chromlyrite casuistry is a nightmare that I don't want to go into with you. We would end up submerged in a sea of very tedious moral exordia. I wish everything were as simple as in the time of Paidas! By the way, I have on the tip of my tongue another romance that is not even painted:

Justice and courage  
His hearts inflame,  
What gallant gentlemen  
They go into battle!  
Corker, cheerful and loyal,  
Combat with two swords;  
Silzan, fair and generous,  
With a loaded shotgun;  
Paidas, happy and invincible,  
His greatsword is already cracking."

Everything was arranged like this, with romances of Paidas, talking of glory, honor, and knight-errant. It's wonderful to have that nostalgic simplistic vision of such a complicated reality. He at least calmed me down every time I got mad at him.  
Anyway, my relationship with him was progressing well despite the clashes. And the same with Zérix, a fellow sufferer in that kind of concentration camps they call schools. Once, I remember him saying the following to me:  
"You want to be my boyfriend?"  
Ah, boyfriend! That word reminded me. It wouldn't be the first time she had a boyfriend. He had had something in Kóverax before. Baeralas rescued him during the assault on a moving train. He was a boy my age, one of the test subjects from Rasko's labs. They had injected him with a lot of strange substances to make I don't know what experiment with him. He didn't have long to live, and having shot him would have been better, but Baeralas felt sorry for him and brought him with us. He thought it would be good for him to spend his last days in company, even if that company was not the best.  
During the short time I was there, the boy asked me if he wanted to be his boyfriend. I did not know the meaning of the word, so I asked Baeralas, who answered the following:  
"What does 'boyfriend' mean? I don't know, it's a polysemic word. Heretics use words like this to justify possessiveness and even slavery. But it doesn't have to. A priori, being a boyfriend of someone is a kind of loyalty commitment that is usually associated with physical attraction, but sometimes there is neither loyalty nor physical attraction, so I don't know what to tell you."  
"The boy you rescued wants to be my boyfriend, what do I say? Can I say yes?"  
"Do what you want. You know that I will always answer you the same when you ask my permission for anything."  
I ended up saying yes. I was excited to have some kind of relationship different from the one I had with the rest of the people in Kóverax. Besides, I was willing to be loyal to the kid. And I was attracted to him, except for the strange bulbs sticking out of his back from the substances that had been injected into him.  
My happiness at first was such that I walked through all the rooms of the castle, shouting from the rooftops that I had a boyfriend. All that coincided with my hilarious conflicts with Dévhatan, and the son of a bitch enjoyed teasing me with the following:  
"Your boyfriend is going to die! Your boyfriend is going to die! Fuck you, Enusor, your boyfriend is going to die!"  
I think, by the way, that it would be convenient to remember that Dévhatan was not another boy my age, but an octogenarian elf, necromancer and crazy, whose sperm were probably those that fertilized Baeralas so that I could be born.  
It pissed me off that he told me that and I even tried to kill him several times. But it didn't help and my boyfriend ended up dying. Most of my friends were condescending to me and encouraged me enough to get through it. Except for Dévhatan, who spent a whole week telling me something like this:  
"Fuck you, Enusor, I was right! He has ended up dying! Fuck you!"  
And I kept trying to kill him for a month, until I got tired.  
Anyway, going back to the moment when Zérix asked me to be his boyfriend, I had relatively recently experienced the bulb boy and I still had the illusion of being the boyfriend of someone who could give me a somewhat more ephemeral relationship. On the other hand, Geiher and Raltia always insisted to me that the couple was very important, but that even more important was that this couple “came from a family with money”. Since the “family” of Zérix that Geiher knew had a lot of money, I assumed that not only were my adoptive parents not going to see anything objectionable in my having Zérix for a boyfriend, but they were going to applaud him enthusiastically. And my adoptive parents still grossed me out, but I intended to have the best of my life together until I was eighteen and be able to elope wildly with Flargan.  
Therefore, to Zérix I replied the following:  
"Okay, Zérix. I'll be your boyfriend"  
Such was my enthusiasm that I ran to tell Flargan. He was very happy, but even that seemed a reason to plant another Paidas romance for me and give me another moral sermon of his own, like a good knight-errant:  
"Are you and Zérix dating? Wonderful! But you have to remember, Enusor, that dating involves a lot of loyalty. Today, heretical society has overturned its meaning and derived it to something like 'temporary sexual alliance.' But you have higher thoughts than that. I'm sure you can be loyal to Zérix, but never forget it! Be loyal, Enusor! Be loyal!"  
His proclamations of allegiance so enthusiastic about him, to tell the truth, intimidated me. I replied, therefore, something like this:  
"But all that loyalty stuff, I don't know. Raltia is supposed to be loyal to Geiher too. Is being loyal enduring beatings? I don't know, Flargan, I don't know if I want to be loyal. Maybe I have to tell Zérix that I have to stop being his boyfriend."  
"Oh no, don't be confused. In the case of your adoptive parents, the disloyal one is Geiher for betraying Raltia's trust. There is nothing wrong with abandoning someone who has been disloyal to you!"  
But Raltia was unable to detect that disloyalty, and it made me gag. Thinking about the time left until the age of eighteen was anguish. And really, I thought the announcement that Zérix and I were dating was going to cheer them up. She couldn't predict, somehow, her reaction.  
It was during dinner that same day. I gave them the news enthusiastically, without any qualms. I hoped Geiher would be very happy and that he would start planning a millionaire wedding in style. But not. His reaction was to turn pale and glare at me.  
"Tell me you're kidding."  
"Hey? Come now! You tell me! You tell me that having a boyfriend is important and that the couple has to have money! And Zérix's parents have a lot of money, a lot, and you know them! And you like them! And on top of that, you complain!"  
"Of course having a boyfriend is important!" When you are a woman, of course! When you are a man the important thing is to have a girlfriend! Girlfriend! And now please tell me this is all a fucking joke."  
"What?"  
Some of all that escaped me. Where was the problem? I still didn't see him. Was Geiher having a bad day or something? At first, my naivety led me to suppose that this must be a kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder, like people who want everything to be symmetrical. Maybe Geiher had a disorder like that, and it caused him great pleasure to see a boy with a girl, and great regret otherwise.  
But no, that had a much more gruesome explanation than he thought.  
Geiher resented that I had a boyfriend because "the normal thing" in heretic society was for boys to hang out with girls. The opposite was "fagots", that is, abnormal. But abnormal for bad.  
Anyone can understand that I, having grown up in an environment in which there were orgies daily and in full view of the children, had somewhat different concepts of what is normal and what is not. But in Kóverax I had been warned — or so I thought — of the ideological peculiarities of the Heretics. He knew the whole issue of the world corrupted by zaibatsus and that obsession to settle for mediocre lives in order not to die out of fear of the concept of "death." He even knew of that blind faith in the ridiculous concept of "possession" that had degenerated in patriarchy, in hundreds of madmen thinking they possess women and other men. But what about homophobia? No, it never occurred to me that there was such a thing.  
When Geiher acted homophobically with me, I didn't even know the word homophobia. Neither the word homosexual, nor bisexual, nor pansexual. There were no such words in Kóverax. People had sexual or emotional relationships with whomever they wanted without cataloging anything. But the Heretic world turned out to be different. And in that childish and naive moment, I couldn't find any other explanation for it than that of a kind of global OCD.  
I keep trying to find a somewhat more logical explanation for this whole issue, but I can't find anything. I would have to know the history of heretical civilization a little better to get closer to the truth. For now, I have my hypotheses. The most consistent of all is this:  
Heretics, in their obsession to possess things, establish patriarchy, and divide the population into two groups: men or possessors, and women or possible persons. There is no ethical dilemma for them that half of the population suffers serious damage as long as the other half obtain supposedly necessary or essential benefits. They also establish a rigid regulation regarding sentimental and sexual relationships, based solely on possession and domination. That game, BDSM, is a clear example of this. It so happens that in order for such a system to be maintained in the long term, the divisions between possessing persons —men — and possible persons —women— have to be very rigid. And since heretics do not understand a form of courtship, marriage, or flirtation that is not based on possession, they automatically assume that in a homosexual couple there must be a possessing man and a possessed man. This leads to the conclusion that the possession system called "patriarchy" is fragile since men can also be owned as women are. Hence comes an excruciating fear of non-heterosexual relationships, like the one she had with Zérix. The same happens with other discriminated people, such as transsexuals — Baeralas. That a man can cease to be a man and, consequently, cease to be a possessing person, is something that unbelievably worries heretics.  
Anyway, I learned all that over time, and it would have been better for me to learn it before because informing Geiher of my courtship with Zérix without taking all this into account was a superlatively catastrophic mistake.  
From that moment on I was banned from radically all contact with Zérix. They asked the teachers to separate us from class and bought two robots that watched me at all times in the institute to prevent me from getting the least bit close to the sessions with the "psychologist robot" were replaced by others with a kind of witch, shaman or weird self-help guru who pretended to "become straight". I can assure you that those sessions made me think of Taepi as a nice guy.  
In the beginning, being lazy was my main reason for living. Then came a kind of ill-managed nihilism, an eternal wait to find new reasons that give meaning to my existence. My relationship with Zérix and Flargan, as well as the latter's promises, caused my regrets to cease for a while for not having shot me when I was on time. But after Geiher's ban, my regrets returned. It seemed that nothing could be worse.  
It seemed that nothing could be worse, yes. Looked like.  
Shortly after I was forbidden all contact with my boyfriend, I found out while going to class that Zérix was not coming anymore.  
He was dead.


	7. Garuga the Ravager: A Moment of Optimism

Raltia was tied to Geiher; Cirea, to Taepi. I don't even know how I felt about it anymore. I was trying to find new people whatever. My boss made me travel to different cities according to the needs of his projects. I had to change my house and location many times, and each change was always full of hope to meet new people who would fill my existential void.  
But I couldn't find anything.  
At the same time, I spoke from time to time with Cirea about the RaskoHerald. With Raltia, obviously, it didn't even occur to me. I have to admit, in fact, that Raltia seemed more and more acceptable to me. When I saw her that time, that night, in Taepi's cottage, I knew that she had become a kind of dead woman. It wasn't worth it for her to continue to suffer so much for such a person.  
My conversations with Cirea didn't usually go much beyond our everyday lives. Taepi, unfortunately for me, was obsessively controlling with her. Where were her feminist ideals?  
But my pain had been so much that not even that affected me anymore.  
However, there was a day when, suddenly, everything changed. For some strange reason that I still cannot understand, Cirea's mind took a radical turn and she manifested it in her attitude towards her partner. He returned to vindicate, with more zeal than ever, her feminist ideology of hers, and did not allow her boyfriend to propagate with her in the least. She threatened him that if she continued like this, she would cut off all relationship with him. Taepi, therefore, had no choice but to give in.  
Some kind of strange miracle had occurred, and it seemed very implausible, but I gladly accepted its results.  
It seemed that, after all, I could regain my friendship with Cirea and Taepi.  
However, my work was quite unstable and my boss kept me constantly wandering from one place to another. He was completely fed up and didn't even have time to see my friends. Thinking of stable couples was a laughingstock; I couldn't find anything, and if I found something it was necessarily ephemeral, that's why I had to go from one place to another.  
In such a situation I spent a few years of my life. I could not say the exact number, and perhaps there were not too many, but they were quite noticeable. Anxiety and stress were permanently marked on my face, as my face was filled with wrinkles and roughness long before I was even approaching old age. Gray hair, on the other hand, multiplied with frightening speed in my hair and mustaches.  
I did my best to hide it, but it still failed to meet the standards of the male beauty canon.  
The years kept passing, and my life was getting blacker and blacker, but before I started to consider suicide there was something that changed everything. Cirea and Taepi began to be curious about the subject of polyamory and the possibility of having multiple partners; They began to talk to me about it, more and more frequently, and even once confessed that they would not mind having something with me and forming something like a love triad. I was very fond of both of them and that idea seemed great to me, but with such an egg-picker boss like mine, I saw it a bit unfeasible.  
And I would have continued to see it unfeasible until the end of my days, but a certain unexpected event turned the matter upside down.  
One fine day a tycoon from the mithril industry stopped by the Taepi adoption center with the intention of taking a child. My friend attended him with all the cordiality in the world, and they established something like a friendship. While the adoption proceedings were being carried out, the magnate told him something about some unexplored terrain near Isrion, in the Setetrín Mountains. He was looking for geographers who could map that area in order to find new mithril mines. The good old Taepi had the deference to remember me and how deep my boss was, so he told the tycoon how beneficial it could be for his company to hire me. The man - whose name was Albian, by the way - was interested, and they agreed to keep in touch to discuss this matter in more detail in the future.  
Before communicating anything to me, Taepi wanted to make sure that such a job could be worthwhile for me, and he discovered, after much talking with Albian, that the contract he would make me could be for a long time, so I settled in Isrion with Taepi and Cirea was totally viable. I would have the area to map right next to me and I could come and go on a daily basis, without having to walk from motel to motel, as I did because of my boss.  
It was therefore urgent to arrange a meeting where we could meet Albian, Taepi, and me.  
It turned out, to my dismay, that those dates coincided with Raltia and Geiher's anniversary, and they planned to throw a big celebration. They intended to throw the biggest party in Domain Rasko in a long time, and they had booked all kinds of shows. Their enthusiasm was such that their obsession with inviting as many people as possible was enormous, so much so that Geiher didn't care to turn a blind eye to some cases. In fact, an invitation even came to me, after years of not knowing anything about that marriage. I hadn't even had a chance to meet the little Enusor and Isludgar. My surprise, therefore, was enormous, and my feelings about a possible reunion with Raltia were enormously contradictory.  
I was close to accepting the invitation in order to see her again. Taepi and Cirea intended to attend the party, and this could be a good opportunity to meet them again after so long, and start a life as a polyamorous triad, but I ended up deciding that it would be better to decline such an invitation. The pain that meeting Raltia could cause me was dangerous. And I would have remained in my resolution, but it happened that Albian was a great friend of Geiher, because he had solved some procedures with his agency; and that, consequently, Albian wanted to attend the party.  
And not only did he want to attend, but he wanted the necessary interview between Taepi, him, and me to take place there. I thought that if I started my relationships with Albian by getting fussy and denying her conditions, my future could not go very well, so I had no choice but to accept, despite the anguish that seeing Raltia again meant.  
The party was at RaskoCentral, where Geiher's family lived, but before that, I had to stop by Vosbiu to run what would hopefully be the last errand for my boss. He was, for the first time in a long time, full of optimism.  
If only I had known the catastrophe that was coming upon me ...!


	8. Lady Lovra: Night in Abandoned School

When I was a child, I went to school.  
Obviously, I only went to school during the day. From half-past eight to half-past two. I only knew the school in that time slot. It had never occurred to me to associate the ideas of "school" and "night". Used to seeing school only during the day, the idea of a school at night was impossible. Obviously, the building had to stay there. It couldn't go anywhere. But it was hard for me to think about it.  
It seemed even more logical to think that the school was swallowed every night by an unknown dimension to be vomited the next morning.  
Yet years later, I was there. An abandoned school. In the evening. A deathly silence that contrasted infinitely with the memories I had of corridors and courtyards crowded with children's screams.  
Such deathly silence and absolute darkness, in a place that had once been so illuminated!  
So many and so many empty classrooms. To think that there was no one and that I was the only person who was there at that moment ... Was there really no one? Really? Not even a ghost?  
I wish there was a ghost. A ghost capable of frightening and frightening me. A ghost capable of disrespecting me. It is not usual for people to disrespect me. From time to time it pleases me that there is someone daring who wants to die. The daring with the desire to die to give some change to my routine.  
I walked through each of the classrooms. The plastic room, the laboratory, the music room ... The music room! With those disgusting, tiny desks attached to the chairs! Exactly the same as the school I was in! The gym. The clues. Physical education!  
I climbed the stairs and came to the door to the roof, the one that was always closed. I shot the lock, went inside, and stood on the highest part of the roof.  
Never would a teacher in his right mind have let me be there. Not going to school at night, of course. I lay down on the roof and contemplated what my eyes were showing me.  
It was a beautiful landscape. All wasteland. Not a breath of life. Before there were towns and industries. Many people had work in these parts, forging magic items and so on. Now there was nothing left.  
I had made sure of it myself by decreeing the expulsion of that deadly virus that had exterminated every last of its inhabitants.  
Just light in that perfect darkness. Far away, a robot factory. The only people who had aroused a modicum of compassion in me. I needed robots, and they needed to live.  
My generosity can reach extremes never seen in human history.  
Are there people more perverse and selfish than the one who decides to make fun of the generous? Acts of kindness are to be greeted with applause in all civilized societies. What kind of principles can a person have who scoffs at the generosity of an extortionist?  
I insist that sometimes I find it gratifying to run into shameless people who are capable of disrespecting me. Those from the robot factory were a good example. They are funny to me, but I don't understand them. I don't understand that lack of ethics. Some kind of psycho they must be.  
I don't know. I wanted my order. And, in theory, my order should have arrived three days earlier, but nothing arrived. And I was willing to wait three days! Three!  
I reclined comfortably on the roof. I just flicked my wrist to press a button on my cell phone.  
Immediately afterward, countless deadly missiles were fired at that horrendous robot factory, forever ending the lives of those wretches who were never able to take the beautiful behavior of altruistic people seriously.  
I smiled. Nothing bothered me anymore, but boredom returned.  
I looked at the stars. They looked good from the roof.  
Precious  
I liked them.  
I really liked them. All of them.  
I fell asleep right there, comforted by the idea that if I ever stopped liking one of the stars in the sky, I would just have to press another button for my henchmen to take care of turning it off, the same way they had. turned off the lives of those evil robot makers.


	9. Ráncor of Jéix: Dating Apps

The plan was fucking awesome. And it is not an exaggeration. It was fucking awesome.  
What brilliance in blackmailing, oh my! In a few months, we took control of almost half of Isoras. We got to accumulate more money even than we could spend in all our lives.  
But did that make us any happier? I am not one of those cynics who say that money does not bring happiness. Of course, it does! But it also usually brings something else called stupidity. On whether "stupidity" and "happiness" are synonymous, there is an eternal debate in which I do not want to enter; Either way, Kato became incredibly stupid as soon as he assumed a position of power.  
He did not mind exposing himself to the public unlimitedly in order to thrive. I preferred to slip into the shadows and act prudently. That people didn't know about me. That they had no idea who I am. And it went well for me. But to Kato? That one went from being a Nobody to literally becoming the target of many snipers. He liked to signify himself and flaunt himself, become a public figure whenever he had a chance. And that was terrible. He was responsible for gaining prominence in a narcissistic way, while the Boomie and I dedicated ourselves, more out of pity than anything else, to cover his back. And sometimes I even regret it.  
Putting all that aside, our lives changed. We were beginning to have options to leave the underground to move through the public sphere. And we were presented with a wide range of options, divided into two blocks: those related to consolidating the power we had, and those related to obtaining even more power.  
Anyone can imagine that Kato opted for the first and me for the second. There will be those who think that it does not make much sense to look for more money when one has more than one can spend in a lifetime; I think, however, that what doesn't make much sense is having a life to spend on bureaucratic stupidity, as Kato did. For these and other reasons, I decided to get into a fun mess that aimed to seize possessions and territories from Rasko.  
All this involved a pilgrimage to me through various cities of the Rasko and Isoras domains. In one of those cities, called Vosbiu, I had to carry out an incredibly tedious assignment: having to wait indefinitely for an incompetent son of a bitch to deliver a package to me. Seeing that this guy could take a long time and that he had nothing better to do, I decided to look for some kind of distraction that would make the wait a little more enjoyable.  
And I relapsed into something I had sworn not to relapse into dating apps. I had only used them a few times before, and in most cases, I had only found ridiculous beings that I didn't deem worthy of existence. I had a lot of fun manipulating their minds with my magic and dragging them into absolute psychosis, but their very presence was unpleasant to the point of not compensating.  
And there I was, getting down that shit again, I don't know if with the objective of finding some subhuman idiot to torture, or with the objective of running into someone who is considered no longer worthy of my sympathy -that's impossible-, but of my indifference. If I show only indifference for someone, without reaching hatred, it is quite an admirable achievement on the part of that someone.  
I only found one person who seemed minimally deserving of my indifference and not my hatred. He looked like a pretty cautious guy. I agreed to meet him and gave him the address of the motel where I was staying.  
The wait was quick; Before he knew it, they were already ringing the bell.  
Despite having had a relatively good first impression, I was hoping to find a rapist who could cause all kinds of psychological disorders without feeling the slightest pang of guilt; however, what I found when I opened the door had nothing to do with it.  
It could be defined as a kind of living flan. He was a guy who didn't seem to have much of a clue what he was doing with his life. He wore sunglasses that had no other purpose than to hide his ability to look into the eyes, longer mustaches for sloppiness than aesthetics, and a staff that appeared to be very powerful, but not in hands like his.  
Such a person could not have the slightest hostile intention towards a woman, or towards anyone.  
Any jerk would say that judging from this little sketch, the guy in question appeared to be a jerk unworthy of anyone speaking to him. But I didn't think of it that way. He appeared to be a harmless and insecure person, but there was something about his face that augured a character full of prudence and dignity. His appearance was that of a relatively young person, but the weary and wary expression of his life implied that he possessed an unusual view of things for people his age.  
"Come in," I said. What was your name?  
"Garuga," he replied, trying to be as cordial as possible.  
I nodded.  
"Rancor. Ráncor of Jéix."  
"Good."  
The atmosphere was too tense. I wanted to break with that coldness, but I wanted to do it without having to resort to my psychic powers. Quite a challenge!  
"Well, Garuga, I suppose you want dinner, right?"  
"Hey, do you want to go to a restaurant? I'm sorry. I have not made a reservation anywhere. I ... the nerves ..."  
"Ha!" Restaurant! Does not matter. I'll order a kebab and that's it."  
"Hey, okay. Kebab is fine. How much would it be? Three fifty, right?"  
I shook my head as I took out the phone to call.  
"You, Garuga, what do you want?"  
"Potatoes with kebab meat. With ketchup instead of yogurt sauce. But, uh, I pay my share. I don't want you to invite me."  
I finished the order and hung up the phone.  
"You're not going to pay anything."  
The guy was getting more and more nervous. I didn't need to use psychic powers to worry that he felt bad about himself for receiving a so-called favor from me.  
"I don't want you to invite me. No… I don't feel comfortable with it."  
"Dear Garuga, I have no intention of inviting you to anything. Well, maybe yes. I will invite you to sit down. Cut your way through all my shit and settle in however you can. This is no big deal, huh? And for the record, you could aspire to luxury suites in the best hotels in the city. But hovels like this have something that makes them more welcoming to my eyes."  
To avoid looming awkward silences, I decided to hit play on my stereo and put on whatever I was listening to before the doorbell rang. Curiously, it was a narcocorrido that talked about myself:

Tu vida se destruirá  
Si te enemistas con Ráncor.  
Mujer tan sádica y cruel  
Jamás hemos contemplado.   
Quien se atreve a ir contra ella  
Jamás sale bien parado,   
Pues, o mueren tras torturas,   
O acaban muy trastornados. 

It was funny. The corrido was sung with an unusual language in the Isoras Domain, so perhaps Garuga was not paying much attention to it; Because, if I had done it, and had known that I was the Ráncor that the song spoke of, perhaps her discomfort would have increased a little.  
Still, I was trying to make him uncomfortable by other means, not so much out of sadism — which too — but to get him to get used to the kind of person he had met through dating apps.  
Finally, there was a knock on the door and the guy with the kebab arrived; He arrived, by the way, with incredible and almost supernatural alacrity, because I have a good habit of hypnotizing kebab owners in all the cities I pass through so that they give my orders top priority.  
I opened the door and received the food with the warmest of my smiles.  
"It's eight and seventy-five," the guytold me.  
"Eight seventy-five? Oh, I don't think so. I think they are zero to zero, right?"  
Withering look. Perfect and instant hypnosis.  
"Ah, it's true." Sorry, I haven't noticed. Goodbye and bon appetit.  
And Garuga's discomfort multiplied.  
"What the fuck?"  
"Do you understand now, Garuga? You do not have to pay anything. Free food, man."  
"What have you done?"  
"Damn, isn't it obvious? Magic!"  
However, that didn't seem to answer his question.  
"Fuck man, you know what magic is, right? You have a staff! I don't think he only uses it to go around the field."  
"I know magic." Basic and functional. Functional, understand, rudimentary. Not functional at those levels ... I don't know that much."  
"So I suppose you know of other things. There's not that much age difference between us and I don't think you spent all your hours jerking off. Although, if so, you might be the greatest wanking expert on the planet. Anyway, tell me, what interests you?"  
And I sat relatively close to him to listen with full attention. I was hoping he would let go of any transcendental cocksucker so that he could give me solid reasons to torture him.  
"The geography."  
That I did not expect.  
"The geography?"  
"Yes. I am a geographer."  
"Geographer…! Geographer! A man of letters in a world that does not want men of letters! Tell me, doesn't that fill you with hate, does it?"  
He nodded and I smiled. I suspected it. There was a lot of hatred throbbing inside that guy. I could sense it without resorting to my mental powers. But he held back too much.  
"Feel free to hate anything you need in my company. That will only give you points."  
And for the first time, I observed a dissatisfied attitude in my companion. So far, he had been content to be passively uncomfortable with everything he said. But at that moment he sighed with some annoyance.  
"Do you want to see me filled with hatred? Oh sure. I suppose you want a boy who has a minimally malicious character."  
He said it with disgust that not ninety-year-olds did. But I loved it.  
"I didn't say that," I replied.  
"Aggression is a highly valued, highly valued, highly valued quality," he said. Aggression, fury, domineering character. All of this is synonymous with virility, masculinity, greatness ... A series of qualities that are magnified by television and the media. A boy, the more virile, the better he is… No, what the hell? A boy, the more virile, the better he fucks. That is believed. Ah! Sorry, Ráncor, I'm not virile. I don't know how to fuck well. I don't know how to fuck, in general. I don't even feel like fucking, damn it, and I don't think I'll feel like it for the rest of my life!"  
People who want to cry tend to fucking disgust me, but that kid doesn't. I surprised myself that I hadn't regretted it yet. He did not seem attractive to me, far from it — no one does — but his gestures and the way he spoke made me feel calm.  
"Hey man, take it easy. I don't like men who know how to fuck well."  
"What?"  
"I'm totally serious. I don't like men who know how to fuck well. I don't like to fuck, in general. It doesn't appeal to me. I had no intention of fucking with you. If you had hinted at me now you would be literally dead, so great that you don't like to fuck. Not for you, but for me."  
He again he felt uncomfortable again. Why the fuck?  
"Hey, I don't mean that I don't find you attractive ..."  
"No, hell, I wasn't talking to you with second thoughts. We'll see. Do I look attractive to you?"  
"Hey? Yes! Really, I swear!"  
"Don't swear anything." I just used my mental powers to scan your mind and I know you are not lying."  
And Garuga paled in a hilarious way. He felt his head uneasily as if trying to touch the mental waves or whatever he wanted him to imagine he had commanded.  
"No, hell, I haven't done anything to you, calm down. But you don't need mental powers to guess that. I know when people disgust me and when I am attractive. And honestly, I am glad to be in the second situation. You were starting to look attractive to me earlier. But I notice that you hold back too much. Of course, I am not talking about sex. I speak of other questions. I look attractive to you, okay, we've already settled that. But now let's forget about that for a moment. Why do you hold back?"  
"Suppress me with what?"  
"Suppress your hatred. I insist; I do not speak of hatred as a prelude to aggressiveness, which is, in turn, a prelude to the more toxic masculinity. A person can hate without implying masculine behavior. There are very feminine people who hate more than you think. You hate, Garuga, but you hold back. You have no way to unleash your hatred. You try to pretend you don't feel hate. Act like you don't feel hate. You even consider that your hatred is not legitimate."  
Garuga grew increasingly uncomfortable. He hadn't used any spells, but he believed he had. He looked at me very suspiciously.  
"You still haven't cast any spells on me?"  
"I insist that no spell is necessary to realize everything I have said."  
"But how can you tell, then?" How? You've only known me for a few minutes!  
"A few minutes are enough to determine if a person has a lot of hatred inside him. I know you repress it because, if you did not repress it, you would not dedicate yourself to what you do."  
That was enough to get my partner to his feet, ready to go.  
"I'm sorry, I don't understand anything you're saying and I'm not comfortable. I should better go."  
"If you stay, you'll be doing yourself a favor. Conversations with Ráncor de Jéix can only have two results: my interlocutor gets a huge profit, or my interlocutor dies. And I insist that if he wanted to kill you, he would have already done it."  
"I think I'm going to get on your nerves if I'm still here. Powerful sorcerers impose a lot on me. I always have the feeling that they see me as an insignificant and ridiculous ant.  
I shook my head and insisted that he calm down."  
"Whether or not a person is ridiculous has nothing to do with the amount of magic they wield. You are not stupid for dedicating yourself to geography. I think the motivation that could have led you there is totally legitimate. But, with so much hatred inside you, is it really satisfying for you?"  
"You talk all the time that I have a lot of hatred inside me. Why? Why are you so sure? I still don't see it. I don't think I have that much hate."  
Again, my friend kept holding himself back. But he seemed to have an easy solution.  
"Garuga, I'll be honest with you." You have a series of very feminine attitudes, or at least identifiable with what can be classified as 'feminine'. A series of feminine attitudes in a world that condemns them and considers them something negative. In a world that, in addition, considers everything feminine especially negative in people assigned man at birth. People reject you, they make fun of you. I'm sure of it. Besides, you are a geographer in a world that does not want literary people. And you are, judging by the canons of beauty, ugly. Ugly and lacking the attitudes necessary to be attractive to an average woman and to get enough sex too, according to society, be happy. Society imposes on you that you need to have sex, and at the same time it denied. But it also denies you the option of having sex. It denies you the option of having sex, it denies you the option of having a proper job, it denies you the option of being yourself… And you don't feel hatred? Are you so utterly stupid that you don't realize how much you've been screwed up, how many reasons you have to hate?"  
"I'm not stupid!"  
"Then you realize it. And therefore you hate. It is not like this?"  
Garuga didn't answer immediately, but when he did, she had no choice but to nod.  
"But so what? Is hatred going to make my life better? No. It's no use. It is absurd to keep thinking about it."  
"It's not about whether your life improves or not. It's about accepting it's there, whether you like it or not. There are also sexual desires, and believe me, they are even less productive than hate. Sexual desires cause harm to the individual and to his environment. The hatred, only to the surroundings of him. I would dare say that hatred well used can provide immense pleasure."  
"I do not know what are you talking about. Where do you want to go? I am full of hate. I admit it. Happy? I can go? I don't like this conversation. I don't know what you were looking for when you looked at me or what you hope to achieve with all this. But I am very uncomfortable".  
The truth is, I didn't know how to answer. On second thought, what did he honestly hope to achieve?  
"I don't know," I said. "If you were a little more receptive, it could guide you down truly fascinating paths. Discover unthinkable pleasures. Pleasures superior to sexual pleasure. Pleasures that only come from hatred well used."  
None of my words moved Garuga in the least. But you didn't see that initial fear in him either. It just reflected apathy and exhaustion from everything.  
"Did you get into a dating app to find someone to lecture with a twisted, cynical philosophy of a video game villain? You can torture me for what I'm about to say, but I find it ridiculous."  
"Do not! I don't want to stay in the sermon. I'm talking about proposing a lifestyle. No don't go! Listen to me! Have you ever thought that it would be nice to be able to end it all?"  
"Kill myself?"  
"No, damn it! End everything that bothers you. Everything that fucks you. You go down the street and you meet more than a hundred little guys whose death you wish. What if I tell you that you can kill them? What if I tell you that you can also kill them without difficulty and without consequences? No need for moral justification? What if I tell you that you can be the one to dictate your own morals, without being accountable to anyone?"  
"Keep dreaming. Kill me or I go."  
I couldn't let go. I felt incapable.  
"The magic! Fuck, the magic!"  
"What are you talking about?" He said to me, already at the door.  
"Imagine you're not a geographer. Imagine being ... Imagine being a great wizard."  
Imagine being ... Kato? Kato before spoiling?  
"I'm not a great wizard," he replied. "And don't give me all this 'if you try hard you can be' stuff. It really doesn't make up for me. The opportunity for a good and quiet life as a geographer has arisen for me."  
"A life in which you will continue to hate without being able to do anything to remedy it."  
"I'm not going to learn magic to become a serial killer. Also, talent is needed! I am incredibly clumsy. Becoming a great wizard would take years. And it doesn't make up for me. I prefer to spend a more peaceful life. I have suffered a lot already. Goodbye, Ráncor."  
"Do not! No, wait! There are other ways. There are magic items! I've never spent time studying magic, and look at me! Do you think my baldness is natural? It was an artifact! A magical artifact! I drained all of her power and went bald in the process, but became a mighty sorceress without spending a single hour studying!"  
Garuga, who hadn't quite closed the door, approached me with a look more compassionate than confused. He, the cheap geographer, was being compassionate to me, the ciborium sorceress!  
"But why do you want me to become a sorcerer? Why?"  
"Because I want a new Kato!" I said, with absolute sincerity.  
There was an explanation for everything.  
Fucking Kato. I refused to admit it. I pretended that I didn't care. That it didn't affect me. But it screwed me up. It screwed me up too much.  
"Who is Kato? Come on, relax. I'm not leaving, really."  
I sat back on the couch and asked him to stay by my side while he tried to collect my thoughts.  
"Kato is the only person worthy of walking next to me. To be more or less at my height. Well ... That was before. He was spoiled."  
"Are you talking about your ex?"  
"Hey? Fuck no! No way would I kiss that guy! No, I do not mean that. I don't even consider him a friend."  
"So what is it?"  
"Come on, I'm going to make myself a RaskoCacao and I'll tell you."  
"Quiet. Explain to me patiently. I'm not leaving."  
While doing the RaskoCacao, I was seriously wondering why the hell I wasn't already murdering Garuga. He was never going to become Kato. Kato was no longer Kato, was it going to be so difficult for me to accept him?  
"Kato was just an equal," I began to explain. Someone with whom I could rub shoulders without considering him inferior. I never had the slightest appreciation for him, but he was a worthy ally. He said that he wanted to be a great wizard. His goals were the same as mine. His way of seeing the world, similar. He did not believe in any power more powerful than magic itself. He wasn't fooled by anything. He had decided, like me, to be the executioner, not the victim."  
"If there were no emotional ties, how could such a relationship fill you up?"  
"Simply by being a valid interlocutor. Imagine, Garuga, living on a planet surrounded by dogs. Without a single human insight. I don't know how lonely you are, but wouldn't it be overwhelming for you not to have anyone to talk to? I'm not talking about making or stopping your company. I'm only talking about giving you a conversation. Wouldn't it weigh you down?"  
"It would overwhelm me, of course. But what does that have to do with your situation?"  
I smiled a bit maliciously. I was about to say something nasty.  
"Easy. You are all dogs to me. Lower beings. Victims subjected to the whims of society. Only the great magicians are at my level. Only great magicians are worthy of a conversation with me."  
"The kebab guy wasn't a great wizard, and you've talked to him!"  
"No, Garuga. I only communicate with the rest of the people for two purposes: either to give orders or to threaten. But I never deign to have a conversation as such with someone who is not a great magician."  
"Yet you are not threatening me, and you are not giving me orders either. You are having a conversation. And I am not a great wizard."  
He had just pointed out the heart of the matter. The conversation I was having with Garuga wouldn't make any sense if it weren't for the fact that I saw Garuga not as a normal kid, but as a potential new Kato. That point of view was absurd and did not make any sense, because my interlocutor had not the slightest interest in magic, and if he did, nothing indicated that he was going to be as good as Kato.  
Yet there I was, treating him like the future new Kato. I was not based on the empirical, but on personal wishes. I wanted a new Kato. I wanted it at all costs. And reality didn't offer me anything like that, but I wasn't good at accepting reality. I was left in the denial phase and ended up imagining that a guy I had just met through a dating app was the new Kato.  
Better to be disappointed in time before making a fool of yourself even more.  
"You're right, boy," I finished saying, somewhat resigned. "You are not a great magician and you do not want to be. But, damn it. I wish you wanted to be. You have the attitude. You hate, and someone who hates has goals too strong to get lost in the sybaritic follies that Kato got lost in. Can you believe it? Now he himself is in charge of running the castle of Lardel, one of the main bastions of Isoras. More like bureaucratic issues. He dedicates himself to leading a comfortable life with that filthy family of hers and giving all the heavy lifting to his knights, the Boomie, and that stupid General Godraf. Kato the Changeling, the man with the seventy million bounties, reduced to a simple family man! You could be something better, Garuga. Your hatred is even greater. You would never accommodate yourself that way. You would continue destroying until the end. You have a lot to destroy! Much to devastate. Who knows? You could end up calling yourself Garuga the Ravager. It doesn't sound bad at all."  
"I'm sorry to disappoint you," he said tenderly, "but my greatest aspiration is precisely to start a family and live a life as disappointing as your Kato's. In fact, I am writing to RaskoCentral for that purpose."  
Too condescending was being Garuga. He didn't deserve it, to tell the truth. He had every reason to flee in terror, but he was still there, listening to me. He might not be a valid interlocutor, but he was being an excellent handkerchief.  
"To start a family?" I said, "And what do you do downloading dating apps if you want to start a family? I, who have downloaded it to look no longer for a partner or a fuck buddy, but a substitute for Kato, I'm not the best person to talk to, but… Isn't a family incompatible with a flirting application?"  
So far, I was being the one giving the explanations. Garuga was the naive and innocent receiver who didn't know much about life and who had to be illustrated by a higher mind like mine. But the moment I asked that question, the tables turned, and the kid was filled with obvious pride as he prepared to answer my question in great detail.  
"No, of course, it is not incompatible. It is incompatible within traditional monogamy, but not in polyamory. With my two friends, I intend to form a romantic triad."  
"But what the hell are you telling me? Polyamory? Romantic triad? What the fuck is that all about?"  
Again, I more pride and desire to explain to me as if I were a retarded child. I deserved it. Before he had treated him totally the same.  
"Polyamory is a way of understanding relationships that go beyond traditional monogamy so that each individual can have the partners they want and however they want. A romantic triad is no longer a couple, but a set of three individuals who love each other as if they were couples. What's wrong? Why do you make that face? You don't like polyamory?"  
"No, is not that. Actually, I have always acted that way. The times that I have had a partner, I have always let it have other partners, and many times I have also had a few others. But I've never referred to that as 'polyamory'. It has always seemed a waste of time to use bizarre terminologies for each of my behaviors that society does not quite accept."  
"Bizarre terminologies, as you say, make it easier for marginal groups to be normalized in society. They make it easier for us to gain visibility and stop calling us depraved."  
And then I understood what Garuga's real problem was. An absolute disappointment!  
"Ha! Normalized! Visibility! I have never cared about any of that. And you, if you were like Kato before spoiling, you wouldn't mind either. What difference does it make to you that society can look down on you if you have enough power to force you to swallow whatever you deem appropriate? Imagine that! Possessing magic so terrible that it avoids moral justifications. That, if you don't like an asshole and you feel like killing him, you can do it without looking for reasons that make the murder pass as ethical in those circumstances. Imagine it, Garuga! Disengage yourself. Turning people into corpses is not only the easiest and fastest method of getting them to respect you, it is the only method of achieving it without generating a zillion mental disorders along the way. Listen to me. Stop weird terms; It will be a very decent step towards sanity. Change all those words from 'polyamory', 'visibility', and 'romantic triads' to 'grimoires', 'runes', 'metamagic scepters', and 'mana storms'. Doing so will give you stability. I can promise you. Become a great wizard, fuck! Make the world suffer your fucking wrath!"  
I couldn't believe it. Was he smiling condescendingly at me?  
"Really, Rancor, you are very kind. For a moment I thought you were really going to kill me. I was freaked out. And now… Talking to such a powerful sorceress without fear that she will kill me… It has been quite an experience. Really, I appreciate that you believe me so… Capable. But I have fought too hard to achieve what I am going to achieve. It is a question, fundamentally, of loyalty."  
He had just uttered one of the few words worthy of respect that I knew.  
"Loyalty, huh?"  
"And you, are you loyal?"  
"With those who deserve it, yes. There was a person who taught me to be loyal. But she also taught me how difficult it is for someone to deserve my loyalty. Ah! She was someone at my height! Better than Kato, even. Too bad it is now on the other side of the planet. The circumstances, friend! The circumstances now make you see a prosperous future with these people. But, as much as you love each other, what does the future hold for you? When you don't have them, what will stop you from becoming a great wizard?"  
"Maybe not knowing where to start. But I don't want to think so negatively."  
"Not knowing where to start." Not knowing where to start!  
I tore a small piece of paper from the first notebook I found and wrote a phone number on it. I gave it to Garuga.  
"If you're ever serious about being a magician, call this number. A female voice will answer you. Then you should hang up. You will have to call again from a different phone. When they catch it, a man's voice will answer you on that occasion. He will ask you to talk to him about music. You should answer that whales can sing better than birds. They will ask you why, and you will answer that it is all a question of structure. Then you will have to hang up again, and you will have to do it quickly, because, as long as they are the ones who hang you, it will have been useless. But if you can hang up in time there will be no problem. Then you will have to wait. You will wait five minutes, and when they pass, he will call you a different number. You will take it and they will give you precise instructions on a place to go to. You will go. These people owe me several favors, and they would have to be very grateful for my sparing their lives; They will know that you come from me, and that is why they will attend to you properly. They will give you access to a series of magical items that, once assimilated, will provide you with abilities incredibly superior to those of other mortals. And so, my friend, you will become a very powerful wizard. But if you fail just one of my instructions, nothing will have been of any use and you will have to continue with your mediocre life, fighting to defend a bizarre terminology that will get you nowhere. Be very careful!"


End file.
